Open Category: Photojournalism / Story (AMATEUR) - HONORABLE MENTION
Alabaster of Volterra

Photo © Alessio Brondi
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One can be impressed entering in a laboratory of an alabaster artisan in Volterra.
Everything is covered by a thin layer of white powder, fallen like fine and silent snow which makes its light a patient and tangible gift.
The working hands of the artisans emerge from the fragments and the powder of the alabaster, harmonizing all around them. The miraculous hands of these anonymous artists can create elegant and graceful creatures and objects from heavy mineral blocks. These are works of great charm and may be born by an unfinished genesis which is still a prisoner in the stones hiding forms and soul. Thanks to the artisans, the works blossom at last with the manual skills of expert craftsmen used to unusual miracles. The absolute Parnassus is near: in Castellina Marittima, at the beautiful Alabaster Museum which keeps thousands of masterpieces.
Alessio Brondi, a 3C-Cascina Silvio Barsotti young photographer who was given a lot of prizes, thought a lot about how to develop his picture tale before starting work. He even went down to the quarries of Santa Luce whose alabaster is the most valuable in Europe and formed in the bowels of the earth of Tuscany million years ago. Going in workshops and shops of white alabaster, Alessio followed his instinct of a “teller trough images” and described the birth of masterpieces, great and small, with a smooth surface like the face of a young girl just fallen in love.
Everything is material and tangible here, but ethereal and shadowy at the same time.
Alessio and his camera write a wordless story, with soft lights and shapes ready to fly.
Everything in his pictures has the special quality of an infinite and inexplicable permanence.
BACK TO GALLERY
One can be impressed entering in a laboratory of an alabaster artisan in Volterra.
Everything is covered by a thin layer of white powder, fallen like fine and silent snow which makes its light a patient and tangible gift.
The working hands of the artisans emerge from the fragments and the powder of the alabaster, harmonizing all around them. The miraculous hands of these anonymous artists can create elegant and graceful creatures and objects from heavy mineral blocks. These are works of great charm and may be born by an unfinished genesis which is still a prisoner in the stones hiding forms and soul. Thanks to the artisans, the works blossom at last with the manual skills of expert craftsmen used to unusual miracles. The absolute Parnassus is near: in Castellina Marittima, at the beautiful Alabaster Museum which keeps thousands of masterpieces.
Alessio Brondi, a 3C-Cascina Silvio Barsotti young photographer who was given a lot of prizes, thought a lot about how to develop his picture tale before starting work. He even went down to the quarries of Santa Luce whose alabaster is the most valuable in Europe and formed in the bowels of the earth of Tuscany million years ago. Going in workshops and shops of white alabaster, Alessio followed his instinct of a “teller trough images” and described the birth of masterpieces, great and small, with a smooth surface like the face of a young girl just fallen in love.
Everything is material and tangible here, but ethereal and shadowy at the same time.
Alessio and his camera write a wordless story, with soft lights and shapes ready to fly.
Everything in his pictures has the special quality of an infinite and inexplicable permanence.
BACK TO GALLERY