...at the very end of Federico Fellini's masterpiece movie, "La Dolce Vita" in which Marcello Mastroianni, having been up all night drinking and carousing with his friends, is down on a beach, walking along in his dinner jacket. He looks across a small inlet and sees a young, blonde girl. It is the same girl he met on a sunny afternoon at a small, beachside cafe. She was setting tables and listening to music on the radio while Mastroianni tried to write on a mechanical typewriter.
In the final scene the young girl looks at him across the inlet and the camera zooms in to show her in a head and shoulders close up. Her expression is very similar to the expression on the woman in my photograph above.
For years the expression above seemed familiar to me but I couldn't place it. It was like a reverberation or echo of an older memory.
When I saw La Dolce Vita again, recently, the connection
was immediate. Which makes me wonder if photographers go through life absorbing random moments, images, visions and scenes that they are attracted to and then spend their personal time subconsciously looking for the same sorts of images in their own creative work, over and over again.
This was shot in Rome, on the Spanish Steps, back in 1995 using a Mamiya 6 camera and the 150mm
lens. I asked permission to take the photograph. I guess that's pretty obvious.
There is a lot of gold in Fellini's fantastic movie. I recommend photographers who are interested in what we now call "street photography" go back and look the movie intently. It may help them save time by not re-inventing wheels that were so well implemented before. But it may give them "suggestions" that clarify the roots of their visions.
It might also partially explain my abiding love for seeing things in black and white....
One of the original Craftsy Photo Classes and
still one of the best!
I met Lance a couple of weeks ago in Denver
and found him to be really fun and knowledgeable
this class reflects what he teaches in hands-on
workshops in Ireland and Iceland, as well as
cool places around the U.S.
How to make what we shoot into a cohesive
train of visual thought.
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