Io il covid e le nuvole

This is the second volume published by Electa and devoted to Michele Pellegrino, the photographer from Chiusa di Pesio who for thirty years has been obsessively exploring his mountains and the people who endure in them, ever since 1975, when he published another great book, Profondo Nord.

Pellegrino documented an epochal transition, the decline of an era, the end of Alpine civilisation. He did so by delving into the depths of each portrait, capturing the intimate story of many individual lives, in a continuous dialogue with the places: from the recording of the pure realistic fact, the photographer’s eye draws pathos and poetic power, transfiguring the subject. An apparently easy, immediate, spontaneous process, but in reality filtered by a refined poetic literary culture, and a richness of life granted to few.
The author writes: “2020-2021 were years of clouds: I had never seen so many. They came from all sides, in the morning usually from the East, sometimes from the South, and were the most mysterious, in the evening the most disturbing from the West. We were advised not to leave home due to the pandemic. So, most of my time was spent at the windows. I’ve always had a soft spot for clouds, but I’ve never spent so much time with them.”

Pellegrino took these shots in the years of the covid pandemic, watching the clouds pass in the sky from the windows of his house.