The Power of Photography

As a boy I discovered the magic and the power of photography through my father, who was an amateur photographer. Thanks to his old camera I found out how a photograph can stop a moment in a life and turn it into a piece of eternity. I have kept that same excitement, that same relationship with photography, ever since. I have always been fascinated by this game of taming light, by the possibility of immortalising an emotion in a portrait, or of telling a whole story in a fraction of a second, without a single word.

On one of my many journeys around the world I had the chance to photograph an old man in the Congo, who objected mildly to what I had done: by photographing him, he explained, I had in a way stolen his soul. That was the moment I understood the secret of a good portrait. When, for a fraction of a second, the soul appears on someone’s face, you have to recognise it and hold that magical moment forever through the lens.