tommaso montenesi posch

Your name
Tommaso Montenesi Posch
Place of birth
Graz, Austria
Place where you live now
Milan, Italy
3 words to describe you
Reasonable, naive, silent
Why do you take pictures?
Mostly to remember
Where do you get your inspiration?
Mainly through photo books
Who are your influences?
Ryan McGinley, Larry Sultan, Rebecca Norris Webb, Milton Rogovin
What determines the subject matter you choose?
It depends, I’ve always been influenced by the ambience around me and how certain people react to it. In order to work I feel that I have to be connected as much as my subjects do with their surroundings. That’s why most of my subjects are friends of mine, because I don’t need to elevate myself from them and be completely detached from their experiences. As much as I shoot them I know that there is no difference between me and them.
What impact would you like your art to have?
Through my photos I would like to tell young generations to start to investigate their surroundings.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
I’ll Be Your Mirror by Nan Goldin
Is there anything you want to add?
My first photobook, The Urgency Of Life, is currently selling on Silvana Editoriale’s personal website!
Silvano Editoriale

The Urgency of Life
Project statement

The urge of taking these pictures comes from one major thing that I feel in me, an extreme moral obligation to capture an individual that is in a critical or transitional phase in their life. During three summers that I was spending photographing my friends I realized that most of them where experiencing what I was constantly looking for, the passage from being a teenager to become a real adult was so strong in them that this affected me profoundly, because using my camera I would isolate myself from them but at the same time, realize what they were going through. I am at the same age they were when I took the photos and with great fear I feel that nothing is changed in me, I’m just older. Their faces in the pictures tell me that I didn’t experience my personal passage and I know now, it’s too late to try to catch it back and live it.