date » 31-07-2026 16:45
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tags » street photography, night photography, street epson 850 z, light avaible, summer time, thumberwald,
© archive manunzio
An italian summer night
Like a late-night summer whisper—the kind that hangs in the heavy, warm air when time seems to stall. The image is (seems) a suggestion, a spark that calls back a distant interview from 1963 in L'Europeo, Oriana Fallaci (Italy’s fiercest, most unsparing journalist) pushing to corner him, and Totò—Antonio De Curtis (the undisputed prince of Italian comedy and tragicomedy)—laying his cards on the table without an ounce of rhetoric.
When she asks if he is happy, he dismantles the very idea of happiness as a permanent state:
"Happiness, my dear young lady, is made of moments of forgetfulness."
He goes on to call them "tiny, minuscule moments when you forget the bad things."
That is precisely (I thinks) what real photography is: a moment of forgetfulness sliced out of time. When you press the shutter on a frame like this—the man, the half-figure locked in shadow, the burning ember—you freeze a fragment where the rest of the world just fades out. Erased.
In that fraction of a second, there are no trivialities, no background noise, no before and no after. There is only the sheer impact of an instant that demanded to be recorded. Totò turned it into a philosophy of survival; with a camera in hand, if we’re paying enough attention, we turn it into physical proof.
P.S. The image itself is a crop from an Epson 850Z — a digital pioneer packing an unusually fast zoom lens for its era, pushing the sensor to its raw limits to bite off this single detail from the night.
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