This past fall I packed up my camera bag to spend a month in an artist residency on the Italian island of Sardinia. It was out of season for Sardinia’s famed beaches, so I spent most days exploring the island’s ancient villages. Street photos weren’t my only interest; I also shot architecture, landscapes, farm animals, abandoned places, portraits – a spectrum of life on the island as I experienced it. That said, people were friendly and street photography often proved to be a good way to capture the essence of the moment.
The residency was one leg of a longer photo trip – two months in all – so I was caught in the familiar tradeoff of having enough gear to cover diverse situations I expected to encounter while also minimizing weight. I decided to pack two Leica M10s – one regular, one Monochrom – so I could share batteries and the 28, 35, and 50mm lenses I selected. I also put a flash in my bag along with a handful of SD cards, a couple of spare batteries, and two filters: the orange contrast filter I like to use with the Monochrom on sunny days and a neutral density filter to shoot fast 35 and 50mm lenses wide open when I wanted shallow depth of field. A 13-inch Macbook Pro, 4GB external SSD drive, and a couple of SD card readers completed my relatively compact travel kit.
Small villages are the essence of life in Sardinia. Of the hundreds of communities on the island, over half have fewer than a thousand inhabitants. I spent many days walking narrow, cobbled medieval streets (and on a few harrowing occasions driving down them, the side mirrors of my rental Fiat Panda only inches from the stone buildings lining the roads, as I prayed that no cars would approach from the opposite direction). I don’t speak much Italian, but a polite greeting, the occasional compliment, and a very straightforward approach to asking permission went a long way. Many seemed amused by the uncommon sight of an eager foreign photographer with two cameras and, given the leisurely pace of village life, they were inclined to indulge requests for a shot.
Since most villages have small populations, to help support businesses many towns hold festivals on autumn weekends after the summer beach holidaymakers depart. Celebrations of local food and culture – always fueled with plenty of wine – attract hundreds (sometime thousands) of revelers, a great environment for working in the street. I made a point of stopping at festivals at every opportunity, which yielded lots of photo opportunities and was also a great motivation to explore more parts of the island.
I was fortunate that Halloween occurred during my visit because the island’s rugged, mountainous interior is renowned for ancient rituals some villagers perform that night, when the separation between the spirit and human worlds is thought to be at its most permeable. Bonfires are lit and men wear shaggy animal pelts, headdresses made of sheep or goat skulls, and large belts full of cowbells. They jump through the fires and enact mock dramas of pursuing and subduing another character that represents a wild boar. Locals believe the tradition has deep roots in a prehistoric European culture that flourished during Neolithic times. This being the 21st century, what was once an authentic expression of folk culture has evolved into more of a performance; nevertheless, on a dark night lit by bonfires, the sights and sounds of men dressed like fantastical animals from a nightmare still brings to mind some of the drama and awe that ancient folk must have experienced thousands of years ago.
As a photographer, I decided in advance that I wanted my Halloween photos to depict the nightmare, not simply men wearing costumes. To undercut the realism – the here and now – and give the pictures a more subjective, uncertain, and edgy feeling I shot in black and white with a flash and slow shutter. As a bonus, the Monochrom camera also gives better results in low light than its color-capable fraternal twin. The performance only lasted a few minutes, not much time to learn from mistakes. I selected a 28mm lens for a wide field of view, and set it to f11 to maximize depth of field, with 1/15of a second shutter. The flash compensated for both the small aperture and the slow shutter. I had to experiment with exposure on the fly and elbow my way through a throng of spectators making videos with mobile phones, sometimes one-handing my camera over their heads to try for a better angle. Not every shot came out as I hoped, but in the end I had a set that I felt captured the event’s essence.
In addition to photographing people, I was fascinated by places without people; Sardinia has an unusual number of buildings, industrial facilities, and entire villages that have been abandoned in the last several decades, as the economy moved on in a different direction. This is not to mention dozens of prehistoric and Roman ruins abandoned thousands of years ago but still prominent in the landscape. With a little tenacity it wasn’t hard to find a way into these lost worlds, which added to the sense of the island existing in a different dimension from ordinary life.
An artist residency isn’t for everyone. It’s much less structured than a workshop or class – you must do your homework, plan a project or theme, and solve your own logistics. There’s no coaching or feedback, and often you’re asked to produce a coherent body of exhibition-quality work in a short timeframe. It’s a lot of work, not an arty vacation. The residencies I’ve participated in have included artists from a variety of visual and non-visual arts, and a wide spectrum of ages and cultures. That makes for a fun and stimulating group, but you can’t count on other photographers being around to talk shop. However, if you’re comfortable setting your own goals and directing your own itinerary, a residency can be a terrific opportunity to deep dive into a place, culture, or topic.
I didn’t focus my residency on a specific project, but saw it as a chance to get acquainted with the island and what it offers photographically. Having educated myself, I have a couple of potential project ideas that I may return to pursue in the future. Strategically located between Europe and Africa, Sardinia has been a crossroads for Mediterranean civilizations almost since humans began setting out to sea; as a result, it is a fascinating layer cake of historic and prehistoric cultures and continues to be a rich source of practices whose roots stretch beyond the farthest horizon of antiquity. I’m fascinated by the dimension of time; the often unexpected ways the past and present intertwine and coexist; and photography’s ability to represent this phenomenon. For me, an artist residency in Sardinia was an ideal situation for an extended exploration of these ideas with my camera.
