There are places that offer nothing easy. I started photographing almost without realizing it, just to document my travels. Over time, it became something else. In February 2022, I left Italy, landed in Moscow, then took a second flight to Syktyvkar. From there, about 500 kilometers by car toward Troitsko-Pechorsk, and then on to Ust-Unya, a name that on most maps is barely a dot. This is where the road ends and something else begins.
The first thing that struck me, even before arriving, was this: no fine-art photographs of Manpupuner existed. There were phone snapshots, passing documentation. I have always preferred not to see too many images of a place before going, because then I risk searching for what I’ve already seen. At Manpupuner, I was free from all that. Just with my own gaze. To understand what that freedom means, you need to understand where I come from. I began painting in oils at seven.
At fourteen, I fell in love with hyperrealistic drawing, and for about eight years I lived within that obsessive and meticulous discipline. When I discovered photography, late and almost by chance, after buying my first camera to document travels, painting had already taught me to read light in a certain way. I saw shadows as active elements, contrasts as the architecture of the image. I never left behind this way of seeing. I carried it with me. My path has not been linear.
I went through minimalism, experimented with blending it with the aesthetics of Japanese comics. Miyazaki had enchanted me since childhood with fairy-tale landscapes and warm, slanting light. When I went to Japan and visited the Ghibli Museum with my camera hanging from my neck, I wanted to create something similar with photography: a hybrid between document and imagination. Then, on one trip, I met a photographer who obsessively talked about colors while I mostly thought about light. At first, we seemed like opposites. Over the days, his persistence sparked a curiosity in me that has never left. I began studying color theory, luminance, saturation, color combinations.
I plunged into an endless universe. Even now I spend hours choosing precise color frequencies. It’s almost an obsession. In recent years my eye has turned toward strong contrasts, shadows occupying most of the frame, lights cut with surgical precision. I am inspired by certain 19th-century landscape painters who used fog and soft light as expressive tools. It’s a direction that feels close to my way of seeing.
When I’m out in the field, I don’t plan rigidly: I want to visit the places of my dreams and improvise once there, because seeing a place in person always offers more possibilities than I expect. I try to imagine each shot already developed; this helps me compose because I already know where I want to go. The first day at Manpupuner brought a windstorm. The light was milky, almost absent, without shadows or contrasts. The silhouettes of the monoliths barely emerged, as if their forms were still deciding whether to exist. I started photographing immediately. The wind had transformed every taiga branch into a sculpture of frost and ice; every close-up was already there, crafted by the climate better than I could have done. It was strange: I wasn’t thinking about technique, nor composition. I just photographed. A calm I didn’t expect. There is one image I carry inside that no photograph can fully contain. A forest ranger approached the most isolated monolith and began to pray. It felt like a powerful gesture, saying more than many words ever could.
The next morning the plateau transformed. A dawn of incredibly vivid colors — orange, red, hues that didn’t seem earthly — completely changed how I perceived the space. I put away the wide-angle, stepped away from the site seeking the proportion between the monoliths and the infinity that surrounds them. I flew my drone: it reveals something you can’t perceive from the ground, the total isolation of those seven giants amid endless white. In those two days I had it all: sun, storm, fog, flat light, explosive light. It’s a rare experience, and I am aware I was extraordinarily lucky.
Post-production was, strangely, the easiest part. Snow in extreme lighting pushes the sensor toward purple and magenta tones, which betray true white. My work was almost entirely on blues, desaturated, slightly darkened, with a touch of green to restore the color quality the eye truly saw. I want it to be clear that there was post-production work, but I want the result to remain clean. I always seek colors that harmonize, like a palette chosen before painting. I use luminosity masks to precisely adjust specific areas without touching the rest; it’s a surgical, slow process that respects the original light of the shot.
The result I seek is an image that looks natural, even if it’s not entirely so. Something the landscape could have been, in a perfect moment that may never have really existed. Manpupuner reminded me that photographing in a place without artistic precedents, with the body at its limit and the mind strangely free, is an experience that shrinks many certainties. I didn’t learn anything new about technique. I relearned how to look without haste.
