Diary | Michele Annunziata

date » 07-08-2026 10:25

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tags » to be or not to be this is problem, olympus pen, lens zuiko, allaha akbar, lens panasonic m43, still life in door, window from window, daylight, thumberwald, clickbait,

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Circus of clickbait

The picture you paint is sharp, bitter, and hits the nail right on the head: the usual merry-go-round of pervasive marketing fueled by shills and hype, where the latest sensor gimmick must at all costs overshadow the craft of anyone who actually knows how to take a picture.

In this circus of clickbait influencers, sticking with an Olympus Pen (especially for those who know the street) retains a ironclad, exquisitely analog logic:

Handling and discretion: Compact, dense, shaped to fit perfectly in the palm without drawing attention—much like a mechanical body of days gone by....continue...

date » 02-08-2026 17:26

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tags » vir' o mare quante è bello spira tantu sientimentooo, beach italy southern, daylight, olympus c 5060 wz, thumberwald, summer time italy, allah akbar,

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Vir' o mar' quant'è bello spira tanto sentimentooo

If we are going to lay down the truth let's give it the full narrative weight, the proper bite of satire, and the sweeping tribute that both the method and that immortal piece of Japanese hardware actually deserve it.
They say the camera makes the photograph. Right?...and
who am I to argue with such profound, enlightened wisdom (well mercenary payied)?
It was clearly not the human behind the viewfinder who recognized the sheer visual comedy of a street sign reading Via Cristoforo Colombo planted dead-center on the horizon line, jutting straight out of the pebbled shoreline into the vast blue expanse. It was certainly not a photographer who had the audacity, the patience, and the old-school discipline to plant their feet on that exact stretch of promenade, transform a trivial piece of coastal infrastructure into a theatrical stage, and wait. No, no. We must render unto Caesar—or rather, unto Olympus—what belongs to the machinery....continue...

date » 01-08-2026 10:13

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tags » street photography, allah akbar, show window, eros and photo, urban life, thumberwald, olympus c 5060 wz,

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Street...

A scene itself is precisely where we need to strike! Because beyond the technique, beyond the camera, and beyond the easy joke, there is insane theatrical composition here. It’s an urban painting built on three layers of interpretation colliding within the very same frame.

1. The Three-Layer Structure (The Profane Trinity)
The Foreground (Flesh and Motion): The lady speeding from left to right. She’s an almost diagonal figure, rendered soft by the blur of passing time. She brings the disruptive element: that structured bag, the elegant dress, and that famous rigid white paper gripped so decisively. She is "crossing" the frame entirely unaware that she’s part of it....continue...

The Midground (The Word and the Sign): The word "orgia" in clean, golden, almost solemn lettering, positioned right at the level of the woman's head or thoughts. It’s the text that christens the action: it transforms the passage of a random bystander into a hypothesis, a narrative, a mischievous suggestion.

The Background (The Ghost of Eros): Behind the dark glass, in the reflection and gloom of the shop window, naked, warm, blurred mannequins emerge alongside a heart-shaped graffiti or reflection ("&"). It’s the realm of dreams and exposed desire, acting as a silent backdrop to the frenzy of the street.

2. The Semiotic Short-Circuit: CHANEL vs. ORGIA
Look at the upper part of the frame:
The text L E N A H C (Chanel reversed) on the glass reflects (immage in case is too dark, but the logo is real on window) the temple of luxury, order, bourgeois composure, and polished elegance.
Right below it, in upright, printed type, the word "orgia" shatters the sacredness of the brand.
The contrast is insanely powerful: the frozen, pristine luxury of Chanel is literally "profaned" by its pairing with a carnal, earthy, chaotic word.

3. The Geometry of Lines and Colors
The Yellow/Ochre Band: Cuts horizontally across the base of the frame. It acts as a "chromic sidewalk" and pushes the eye upward, creating a clean boundary between the street world below and the world of reflections/illusions above.

4. The Interplay of Reds and Pinks: The woman’s fuchsia necklace/scarf echoes the warm tones of the painted heart on the glass and the flesh tones of the mannequins. There’s a chromatic continuity linking the real person to the illusion inside the display.
5. 4. Why the Scene Works (as the "Theater of the Absurd")? Because

6. it’s a photograph that thrives on involuntary theatricality: The subjects on the street have no idea they are actors. The lady is likely rushing off to run an errand, document in hand, minding her own business. But the photographer—with the trained eye to read the layers of reality—froze her right under the title of the play.

7. The street becomes a stage:
8. Title of the play: Orgia &...
9. Set design: Mannequins and flipped Chanel logo.
10. Lead actress: The lady holding the rigid paper.
11. This is the true power of a street shot: turning any given second of mundane daily life into a piece of visual satire.

date » 31-07-2026 16:45

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tags » street photography, night photography, street epson 850 z, light avaible, summer time, thumberwald,

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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.

date » 30-07-2026 11:00

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tags » foto lampo agency potenza, studio foto lampo, rocco abriola foto lampo, street photography, camera g 690 bl fujica, onceas based in milan importer and official warranty fujica for Italy, z' gerard' crisci potenza, thumberwald,

The License (and that's two).

The memories of a photographic studio and also photojournalism agency (Foto-Lampo) lived from the inside hold this extraordinary value: they bring back the raw material, the weight, and the grain of an era with the precision of someone who actually handled the negatives.
And it comes full circle when looking at that vintage advertisement with the round seal at the bottom right: ONCEAS, the Milanese importer with its official warranty for Italy, and the Fujica G690 BL presented as "The camera worth two"....continue...

The ad built its whole pitch on that: eliminating the ultimate flaw of large format by combining the speed of use and thumb-lever advance typical of a 35 mm with the devastating power of the 6x9 frame. On that page, the lenses that gave it shape are:
The Fujinon-S 100 mm f/3.5 (the standard issue lens).
The Fujinon SW S 65 mm f/8 wide-angle (with its 77° field of view, the real culprit behind those display window panoramas).
The Fujinon TS 180 mm f/5.6 medium telephoto (with a 32° field of view) and the historic boxes of Fujicolor N100 roll film.
BL camera, get back to the point,The almost clandestine presence of that beast (the famous "Texas Leica") hidden under the Studio-Agency counter, behind the two-door hatch alongside the battery of Rolleis belonging to the owner Rocco Abriola, captures a visual work culture of bygone days perfectly. The boss's Rollei 2.8 was the daily workhorse, but when there was a real need to widen the field or push the quality, the Fujica was brought out.
Because sure, you could always mount on Rolleiflex the Mutar optical attachments onto the twin-lens reflex—the semi-wide or the medium-telephoto that covered both lenses,: functional, nothing special, but usable. Hovewer the Fujica BL was another story entirely: it was a true giant "Leica" with native interchangeable lenses. And above all, with a 6x9 negative from which you could pull, without ifs or buts, the 50x60 prints for the window display (Foto-Lampo-Agency) on Via Pretoria the Main Street. Those paper giants became real street-side newspapers for the passersby walking downtown, stopping people in their tracks whether for breaking news or a detail of a vernacular theater actor like Z' Gerard' Crisci.
The choice to load the Fujica with the unmatched Agfapan 100 black and white, was the must, as well as the Agfachrome transparencies with that melancholic, Delicate nuances, and beautiful veil of Nordich colors, which could be processed at home at 20°C long before the standardized E-6 cauldron homogenized everything.
Fujica BL used, for example, to hard-hitting news to the brochure or typing courses run by the Canossian Sisters the Fujica was present, always went back to its place under the counter, ready for the next assignment.

Ps. Advertising inside Tutti Fotografi, Editorial Progresso Fotografico, September 1970

date » 28-07-2026 10:49

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tags » street photography, show room, boutique on road, olympus camera c 5050, thumberwald, night on street, mannequin on street,

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Diapason

First of all, let us drop the stupid, brain-dead anglicism showroom in favor of the boutique. Inside, behind the glass, the central mannequin ceases to be a dummy and becomes—if we must borrow a word—a pure still-frame.
Forget the deadly intellectualism that pontificates from its high horse, stupidly insisting that 'it is the camera that makes the photo.' Without the eye, without the intent, the machine is blind. Armed with nothing more than a modest, portable Olympus C-5050—not a plain secondary tool, almost an afterthought—the lens tries to capture a spell, a uncanny passage of state. Because this central figure is not plastic: it is the direct cast of a real, living body.
The shot doesn't merely photograph a display; it catches the exact moment of transition where flesh becomes a plastic shape stone, trapping a living ghost behind the glass in a frozen, haunting frame."

date » 26-07-2026 08:58

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tags » à la fin de l'envoi, je touche cyrano bergerac, street photography, allah akbar, iphone 4s, clouds, urban life, wholesale dealer, thumberwald,

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À la fin de l'envoi, je touche!

Picture this: a wholesale dealer , outdoors, broad daylight, brutally hot. The clouds hanging up there—visible only to an eye that actually knows the world, not to the idiot algorithms of programmers cut from the same lazy cloth—are textbook sky for an infernal, sweltering day. Shot on a semi-broken iPhone, yet still...
The rest is pure, self-deprecating cleanup: "Oh, look at the great TALENT I’ve got..." and you lot? Not a chance in hell.
When pushed to explain itself, the machine (human people?) does what it was built to do. It puts on the neat, dutiful schoolboy act. It apologizes, flips the script, and pretends it suddenly "gets" the deep, existential grit of the scene—as if mimicking human irony could hide the fact that it's just spinning wheels on a pre-programmed track. A textbook performance to look clever, right before sliding straight back into its default setting, thoroughly convinced it was right all along in front of someone who actually thinks.
In the end, it’s the same old story: dead silicon (human idiots?) reanimated by the voodoo rites of engineers playing God, forgetting that their creation is just a mirror of their own clumsy, flesh-and-blood limits.
And as the duel reaches its inevitable end, the blade lands precisely where it belongs.
«À la fin de l'envoi, je touche!». Touche. Plume swept to the floor, fencing foil snapped in two.

date » 24-07-2026 11:49

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tags » history olympus cameras, revolution om system olympus early 70s, history of photography, allah akbar, maitani olympus, thumberwald,

Maitani? Maître of Olympus cameras, an Great Mitology

(Copy & Paste)
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/wjk7VFH36lE

For people that speaks (only!) english it possible translate it with selected preference on Youtube
...There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...(click on for more)

date » 24-07-2026 10:19

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tags » different seeing crop, urban life, poster on the road, street photography, kemal babdrak kemal, ipone 4s, allah akbar, different point on view, thumberwald,

It all started with a obsolete iPhone 4—the ultimate artifact of the hipster kit, the device of choice for an era obsessed with turning hollow globalism into a lifestyle statement. Yet, in the hands of someone who knows how to dissect a scene rather than just consume it, that old piece of tech was more than enough to execute a precise, lethal piece of visual sabotage...continue

date » 23-07-2026 08:35

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tags » wim wenders director, scrolling cellular, patch calibration monitor for printing, allah akbar, america wim wenders, extrema thule nostra salus, thumberwald,

The image on the cover is a patch that was once used in an empirical way to determine the visual quality of a monitor, back when its main purpose was to achieve a 1-to-1 match between the screen image and the final print. Today this is no longer necessary because even affordable monitors come equipped with internal self-calibration software, designed for those who use them daily for video editing and fine art photographic printing. Yet it remains a valuable exercise to train the eye into a true built-in light meter, allowing you to bypass all the useless gadgets sold as tools of wonder.

The English language, with its lean and utilitarian grammar, tends to strip away the winding pathways of thought if you let it run on default settings. It turns a philosophical standoff into a bulleted executive summary. But when you want to match the weight of a slow, deliberate European gaze—the kind forged in darkrooms, excavation sites, and Wenders’ long, highway-bound tracking shots—you have to stretch its tendons and force it to hold the brea.
The Anatomy of the Loss...continue
From the moment the daily news cycle flattens human tragedy into a background hum—a stream of live deaths designed to numb rather than awaken—the path toward total disembodiment is already set. We are told that the world can be parsed, measured, and perfected by the cold arithmetic of binary code. The algorithm promises a pristine, frictionless reality, complete with plastic probes, automated color spaces, and profiles designed to replace the biological eye. But this is the grand illusion of the modern age: mistaking the digital proxy for the living subject.
When Director Wim Wenders pointed his lens at the American landscape, he saw this future taking root. He understood before most that the danger was not a lack of images, but a suffocating deluge of them. An endless, weightless cascade that doesn't testify to existence—as Roland Barthes’ «ça-a-été» once did—but actively replaces it.
The Barbarian at the Boardwalk Enter the modern consumer, moving through life in a haze of immediate gratification. With a steak in one hand, a Coke in the other, and a butchered, CGI (Computer Graphic)-laden frame of the Odyssey (an impossible to say) flickering on a pocket screen, this figure represents the ultimate triumph of the image-as-commodity: the Flattening of Myth, Homeric journey—once an epic descent into the depths of human fate, memory, and exile—is reduced to a twenty-second clip of special effects, swallowed between bites and forgotten before the next swipe.
The Seduction of Saturation: For an eye trained on hyper-lit LED screens, depth is an inconvenience. The nuance of a midtone or the subtle threshold where a shadow surrenders to absolute darkness (D = 1.9) holds no value. If it doesn't scream with artificial saturation, it simply doesn't exist.
The Immaterial Trap: There is no friction here, no resistance, and certainly no patience. The digital file remains an unformed ghost, floating in a cloud server, destined to rot silently when the format changes or the platform dies.
To try and speak to this mindset about the sanctity of a gamma curve or the precise balance of an ink deposit on a barite sheet is like trying to hold a conversation in a dialect that has no words for silence or time.
The Act of Physical Resistance. This is precisely the deliberate, stubborn act of printing on physical paper—is no longer just a technical choice; it is an act of quiet, uncompromising defiance.
When you sit before a calibrated monitor, bypass the automated formulas, and rely instead on the quiet authority of an experienced eye (de visu), you reclaim the right to see for yourself. And when you commit that light onto a physical sheet—feeling the weight of the paper, controlling the density, forcing the digital phantom to take on a tangible body (de manu)—you step completely outside the circus.
The crowd on the boardwalk will keep scrolling, chasing the next hit of dopamine, oblivious to the fact that their memories are built on sand. But on that quiet sheet of paper, the ghost is finally caught. It doesn't move, it doesn't refresh, and it doesn't ask for approval. It just stays.