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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
Francesco Merlini was born in Aosta in 1986. After receiving a Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design at the Politecnico University of Milan, he devoted himself completely to photography.
After covering Italian news (with L'Espresso, Internazionale, Gioia, Anna, Rolling Stone, D La Repubblica, Le Monde, Tageszeitung, and Wired among others), he now works mainly on personal long-term projects, corporate-work and editorials.
In 2012, Merlini was published in the book MONO Vol. One alongside renowned photographers such as Roger Ballen, Daido Moryiama, Anders Petersen and Antoine D'Agata.
Among many reviews on renowned photography sites, he has been featured on TIME Lightbox as among the new most interesting contemporary black and white photographers.
He is represented by the photojournalism and story-telling agency Prospekt and since 2015 his work has been represented by the Stockholm-based Stain Gallery.
Merlini lives in Milan.
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
fototazo: Tell us a little about yourself and how you became a photographer.
Francesco Merlini: As with a lot of photographers of my generation, while studying at university (industrial design) I started taking pictures of friends, road trips, drunken strangers at parties and this kind of stuff; later, five years ago, I had the great luck to start working with the photojournalism agency Prospekt that now represents me and I started to realize small reportages and news pictures for Italian and international magazines.
In the meantime, I started being charmed by how photography was enabling me to find something that maybe I had already found, but that was hidden inside me. The photographic quest started to assume another meaning, another value that gives life to a journey of discovery that sees its arrival in myself. Maybe I've chosen to work with photography and not with other creative mediums because when I take a photo I work with reality, and reality cannot be destroyed because it has not been invented.
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
f: On your site you have some older color work, but most of your photography is black and white and you've evolved a high contrast, dark, grainy aesthetic. What brought you to the way you make images today?
FM: I think that if you want to faithfully depict reality, color is the best choice while monochrome has stronger elements of abstraction and symbolism that enables me to put more of myself in the picture. In intimate and personal work like mine, maybe color would become a useless decoration. Anyway, before starting a new series, I always think about which visual language would be the best in order to bring out what I want to raise in the work; I don't rule out that for my next series I could use color. With my series “Farang” I used high contrast, but I decided to avoid pure blacks and pure whites and to focus on a wide range of grey because of the sense of suffocation that grey arouses in me.
On the other hand, most of my works have been long-term projects and the use of black and white has enabled me to mix very different pictures taken in very different situation without breaking the aesthetic flow I was aiming at.
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
f: How much is post-production a part of how you make a photograph? What is your working process for post-producing images?
FM: Well, deciding how to post-produce an image is very important for my work as much as, for example, deciding to use the flash or not. I think that the substance of the picture always lies in the subject, but post-production helps you to lead the eyes of the viewer and to suggest an atmosphere. It should not become pure decoration that transforms a useless picture into something aesthetically pleasant. Usually, when I'm working on a long-term series, before shooting I already have an idea about what kind of post-production I'll do on the pictures I'll take, otherwise the entire process would be - to me - too accidental and lacking something important.
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
f: The title of this project, "Farang," is Thai for "Westerner" or "caucasian." Some of the images reference Thailand, like the man with the elephant and the man who appears to be fishing with a moon at the top of the image. Others appear to be made elsewhere, maybe Italy. Is "Farang" a narrative project, a travel project, a personal project? How does it relate to Thailand, Thai culture and, I'm guessing, your travels there?
FM: It's very hard for me to think about a nomenclature for this work. These pictures have been taken in very different places in a time span of three years. What connects the pictures of this series is that, as the title suggests, after years of pictures in a "comfort zone" made of people and places I knew, all the pictures of "Farang" have been taken in circumstances that are alien to me. What happened in front of my eyes and my emotional and visual interior mold together in order to create a personal interpretation and narration of things, places and people, transforming something that is totally extraneous to me into something that is mine. The flash of the camera has consecrated my epiphanies, impressing the shroud that lies on the subjects whose truth I've discarded. These images are just relics of the invisible.
The pictures of this series have been taken in Italy, France, Turkey, Thailand and Kosovo. Thailand is just a place where I was during that period of my life, but it was particularly interesting because it was my first time in Asia and it was very hard to look for something that made sense to me without falling into the visual imitation of the masters who have delightfully photographed Asia like Daido Moryiama, Antoine D'Agata or Jacob Aue Sobol. At the beginning, wherever I looked, I glimpsed pictures that has already been taken.
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
f: You unite portraits, objects and spaces through the aesthetic decisions we were talking about earlier. There's also a sort of unity of tone and subject, a darkness of death, naked women in the sex industry, trash, blood and barren cityscapes. There are also references to the ocean, plants and children. What are the criteria that you use for including images and how to you develop, mix and build these visual themes?
FM: I don't have a real criteria about my subjects; I think that it is just my background, my interests and especially my curiosity that make me choose what to photograph. It's my mind that makes me see something special in situations that often are quite normal. The camera becomes an instrument to break people's blindness to reality's wonder and to the fascination that I feel.
Later, the editing process is very important; I separate the photos that are only aesthetically pleasant from the pictures that have a sense according to the story that I want to tell. Every picture has to have something in it, every picture has to evoke or suggest something in order to move the viewer. I believe in the invisible. Beauty is not enough.
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
f: I'd like to ask you also about sequencing – the way you present “Farang” on your site, it has a noticeable strength of formal relationships between successive images. Can you tell us a little bit about how you think about sequencing and presenting your work?
FM: I work also as a photo editor and I know how much the sequence can affect the quality of a photographic series. It's not very different from doing a movie, looking for a rhythm that doesn't anesthetize the viewer trying to arouse emotions that change during the progress of the sequence. About subjects I always try to mix the contents, but I also love to create formal links between the images; sometimes they are evident, sometimes more hidden.
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |
f: You have worked in fashion and currently do editorial work and have also worked in other professional photography industries. How does your personal work interact with your professional work?
FM: Working on assignment and doing personal projects generate two totally different ways of looking at things. Yes, the medium is the same, but when I work on my personal series there is not any technical or client-satisfaction issue, I focus only on what catches my attention and can become a piece of my narration. When I do a fashion shoot or I take pictures of an interior, I try to do my best mixing my personal aesthetic vision with the client's expectations, but I miss a big part of what makes me love photography, the possibility to show the invisible.
f: Do you always carry a camera and always shoot? Or in periods and in particular places?
FM: I used to bring a camera always with me when my aim was to simply keep a visual diary of my life, but I stopped when I started to feel like I was squeezing reality without any objective. I started to look for more complex and congruent narrations and I've begun to bring the camera with me only in some situations that coincide with travel, a period of my life or a focus on a particular topic.
[Editor's note: This post was updated 5.16.15 to correctly state that "farang" is Thai for "Westerner" or "caucasian," not "foreigner" as originally stated. Thank you to Mitchell Alland for the correction.]
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| From the series "Farang" © Francesco Merlini |