“After few years of study and workfield as a freelance, in 2003 I founded the non-profit organization Fotografi Senza Frontiere-Onlus…

…serving as Secretary until 2014, organizing fundraising shows and auctions and mainly running photography workshops to young people and teenagers in difficult areas of the world (Algeria with the Saharawi people, Uganda, Palestine and Panama with the Kuna people) with the strong convinction that photography can be a universal language of self-representation..

…The journey has been full of satisfactions and travel experiences that have elevated me both as photographer and as man…

…I have learned that life can and must be lived with passion, vision and abnegation.”

Emiliano Scatarzi

FotografiSenzaFrontiere
The experience of photography as a means of self-representation
Nicaragua (1997), Algeria (2002), Palestine (2004), Uganda (2008-2009), Bethlehem, Dheishe Camp, IBDA’A Cultural Centre (2010), Usdub, Kunayala, Panama (2010-2011).

Set up in fringe areas or war-torn zones, aimed at kids’ or women’s groups, such as the experiment with the Saharawi women or the Managua street kids, FSF-onlus laboratories are all founded on the same shared belief that photography can be a precious form of expression able to offer people who live in tough circumstances and in places where they may be victims of discrimination, an efficient and competitive means of representing their own reality from within. So that they can lay bare their own codes of behaviour and sensitivities by means of a medium that is easy to use and that everyone can understand.

On the other hand, the tradition of reportage has led us to become familiar with seeing emergency situations from an outside perspective. The reporter, however scrupulous and desirous of objectivity, aims to document and recount events thematically and to report facts. Yet he inevitably does so through the filter of his own culture, influenced by the idea that he has managed to form of that context. In FSF-onlus laboratories we experience how photography can be an immediate way of describing an event subjectively, telling the story of one’s own life without the encumbrance of filters. Thus revealing much more of oneself and succeeding, to a certain degree, in reducing that sense of human impotence, which is generated by insecurity.

An instrument of free expression and conscious self-representation, practicing photography in FSF-onlus laboratories means, above all, fighting against an unfair and unacceptable form of defeatism. It means having access to an education and bringing into play profound values which enrich not just all the people involved in the projects but also the people who come to see the pictures produced in the FSF-onlus laboratories and projects. And we have witnessed it time and time again in the expressions of joy of the pupils when they see their first photographs or an exhibition or book of their pictures.