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This humble odyssey traverses landscapes and locations, seasons and moods. However whereas an odyssey implies grandiose feats and suffering of a hero on his journey, for the most part the making of Vagabondo involved only my own fairly tame wanderlust across Europe and America in a quest for locations. And though I did photograph my subjects in stories of some hardship and itinerancy, the courage they show is mostly in suffering various discomfort in filthy locations.
Since quite a bit of the book was photographed around Italy, Vagabondo seemed an appropriate title, evoking for me the dishevelment of an unpretentious, timeless labouring man, leading both with his soul and unencumbered raw sexuality, transforming menial suffering and unconscious beauty into splendour. There is something of a heroes progress too, even if not reaching the status of odyssey; one of the main characters is literally elevated, from menial peasant worker to Bacchus-like god, bathed and pampered in ancient palazzos, finally ascending into lofty volcanic Hades bleakness and immortality. Well that’s how I romanticised it over the many hours of editing.
The story begins in Ireland, in spring time, with farmhands cavorting in lush fields and around farm yards, then moves across to industrial London and a brief interlude of fighting athleticism before cutting to Italy where building labourers work and camp out in derelict palazzos in Sicily and Puglia. With their grace and beauty revealed amidst the gorgeous rustic decay they finally wrestle in cleansing showers and submerge in Sistine waters.
The middle eight of the book’s song is the trek of our heroes up black mountains and amidst burnt forests which lend a winter melancholia, and our vagrants shine in a grim Biblical wilderness, before volcanic rock formations and ancient ocean cliffs reveal, at the end, a happier contemporary summer setting around the ocean surf, where they can revel.
Hardcover Published 15 December 2023 160 pages