I am happy to be August’s featured photographer on the Firecracker website. The site is run by Fiona Rogers and promotes female photographers in Europe. The featured project is my series LIFE AFTER ZOG and other stories and it’s accompanied by a text written by Denis Curti, Director of Contrasto. Click here to see the feature and to read the text. Below is a short extract.
THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE IMAGE RECALLED by Denis Curti.
Back in the early nineties, when Chiara Tocci was still a little girl, she would watch Albanian refugees landing on the coast of her native Puglia. Gazing out to sea she could picture in her mind the country they were coming from, but there before her eyes the only scene that unfolded was one of desperation.
Twenty years after those events had been confined to memory, Chiara returned to the same scenario, deciding this time, however, to cross the sea, go beyond the horizon, and take a look at the country she had only been able hitherto to visualize in her imagination. Curiosity, as well as the need to know and to tell, led her to undertake a journey that would lead her to the Albania of today, where her eye finally encountered the characters and locations of a real story.
Her memories come back to life in the form of a story told in images, in which the photographer’s lyrical vision and the more direct, photojournalistic eye alternate roles.