PERCHÈ NON SORRIDI, ADESSO?

“Perchè non sorridi, adesso?” Is a simple question my father asked me throughout his life. he had been asking me ever since i was a teenager, whenever my face seemed too serious to him, almost unable to comprehend how anyone could live without a smile. It was a question i always left unanswered.

My father, on the other hand, was always smiling. He did so with a disarming naturalness, even when life had already begun to ask a lot of him. His smile remained intact even during the slow progression of alzheimer’s disease. As the illness erased memories, names, places, and fragments of his story, that question kept resurfacing with surprising persistence: “Perché non sorridi adesso?”. In those brief moments of lucidity, he seemed to recover something of me and, perhaps, something of himself.

This work stems from there: an attempt to confront what an illness takes away and what, instead, manages to survive. The photographs collected here span the last seven years of my father’s life and, at the same time, recount my own alongside him. They do not seek to document the disease nor to describe its clinical progression; rather, through photographic language, they build an intimate narrative composed of fragments, silences, gestures, objects, and inner and real landscapes—where memory intertwines with imagination and lived experience.

Photography thus becomes a space where reality coexists with what is evoked, where narrative gives way to metaphor, and loss transforms into remembrance.

“Perchè non sorridi adesso?” Is a question my father used to ask me, but today it echoes as a question i ask him and, perhaps, myself. Every time i remember it, his smile returns. and sometimes, mine does too.