Francesco Berti started taking pictures many years ago, almost by chance. A self-taught photographer, he has always been interested in extreme situations, in marginal areas, but also in beauty. In the past few years his obsessions have been bodies and goodbyes. In his works, be it landscapes or portraits, he researches beauty and loneliness, a feeling of something that has been experienced but in some way already abandoned. His interest for portraits is recent and he has been focusing on male portraits as a way to explore his identity and his relation to the male universe.
“Insomnia” is an attempt to describe the end of a relationship. The cold light and desaturated colors don’t diminish the obsessive gaze that becomes tangible in its attempt to examine the subject’s body.
The model is stripped down of everything that in this time defines one’s identity: clothing, accessories, stauts; deprived of his identity, he becomes an archetype.
A naked body, a body aching from its thinness, a body without identity that incarnates the end of a love story. Because the end of a romance doesn’t consist only of splitted objects, of undermined balances, of hurt feelings, but it is also, and most of all, missing your loved one’s body, all of its creases and perfumes.
The work wants to freeze the moment in which you realize that the body of your loved one doesn’t belong to you anymore and you can only try to impress in your mind everything that you see, knowing that time will soften the edges of every frame.”
