PHOTOS Gabriele De Marco

“I‘ve never understood whether one of the reasons I started working as a photographer was precisely the excuse to meet «the “Frigidaire” people». The ones who wrote stories that were the fuel that made the imagination of us very young readers take flight. So, between proposals and publications, proofreading, volunteering and (rarely) postdated checks, I began to get to know those who were my idols. But meeting an idol can prove dangerous: the image you have built in your head is so idealized that more often than not getting to know them personally turns out to be a disappointment. But with «the “Frigidaire” people» the word disappointment had no meaning. Even though almost all of them were different from how I had imagined them, each one’s originality was a source of surprise. With Andrea it was different. He was exactly as I had imagined him: a guy with inexhaustible energy, who infected everyone around him.

(…) Andrea turned out to be a singular character, for whom any definition proves exaggerated or reductive, because to describe him you would have to free yourself from words and resort to emotions.

Perhaps that’s why images were for me the most natural way to tell his story. Free from ‘verbal” definitions and limits, photos manage to tell a story by traveling less rational roads than those taken by writing, certainly closer to the ones Paz took in creating his stories. And just as he framed his characters inside the panels, I framed him in the camera viewfinder, deluding myself that I could capture him; by trying to fix him on film I was trying, in some way, to steal a small part of his soul.”

Gabriele de Marco