Stefano Signorini

Night Falls on Dreamland

Streetlamps and waning daylight penetrate layers of gloom descending on Cassone, a medieval fìshing village on the shores of Lake Garda in northern Italy.
The evening scene caught the eye of Italian pho-tographer Stefano Signorini one August.
He had already composed countless pictures of Italy's largest lake—but never one like this.
"I felt like I'd entered a place of dreams," he says. "Here was a small port full of fishing boats with no one around, the lights of lampposts reflecting in the water, and in the background, the dark, brooding presence of Monte Baldo.
I imagined a place full of gnomes and fairies and talking trees.
But I knew the magic of this dream-scape was due entirely to the lighting conditions of the moment, and that the moment would not last.
"Signorini regards himself as an artist more than a photojournalist. For years he focused on microphotography, finding pleasing shapes and colors in close-ups of everyday objects.
Then he moved on to humor photography, looking for irony in juxtaposition.
In more recent years, he has almost exclusively shot panoramically, focusing on landscapes he knows best: his hometown, Verona, and nearby, glacier-carved Lake Garda.
He displays his panoramas, capturing the beauty of the region, in prints up to 65 feet across.
Lake Garda has long been a popular destination for Europeans. Eleven miles wide in the south but narrow and fjord-like in the north, it's ringed with resorts dating back as far as the 1400s.
Modern patrons flock here for sport—windsurfing, boating, diving, rock climbing, skiing, and snowboarding.
"I often mountain-bike at the lake," Signorini says, "and I pack my camera and tripod, because the views al-ways change. Around here, you can never get bored."
In the village of Cassone, Signorini likes to walk the narrow lanes lined with the old houses of fish-ermen, until he reaches the waterfront.
"The tower you see to the right was once a mill but is now a private residence," he says.
As it happened, on this evening Signorini left his panoramic cameras at home.
He made do with a digital SLR, taking a sequence of 15 vertical photographs that he would combine later into a panorama.
The composition extends to 270 degrees, wider than a human's usual half-circle perspective.
"I sometimes create images as wide as 360 degrees," Signorini says.
"This kind of panorama makes visible something our eyes cannot see in a single gaze.It creates a new reality."

Scott S. Stuckey

SETTINGS Fuji 52 Pro digital camera; 20mm lens shot at F8, 2 seconds; multiple images combined with Photo-Vista software. .

Articolo pubblicato su
National Geographic - Traveler di Novembre/Dicembre 2007.