Choose Your Pain” Editorial by Marco Redaelli

EDITORIAL ChooseYourPain by Marco Redaelli

Choose your pain. it may be a figure of speech, it may be paraphrase, an hyperbole, but in the end it is a real thing. We all choose a pain, something that makes us love and despair, alternating joy with anger and desperation, or often making you feel it together at the same time. Love, passion, hate, desire, dedication, obsession, for one person, for several people, a job, a goal, for an ideal, a dream, a mission, a God. More or less everyone, someone more, someone less, sooner or later in life they have chosen their pain. My pain is photography, something that has accompanied me since I was 13 when I was given the first reflex and I immediately became for everyone “the boy with the camera”. It was passion, work, love, then, for reasons I won’t talk about here, it became pain, frustration, then nothingness or almost nothingness for long time, years and years, for many of you who read more than the duration of the their current life. Then Pretty Vacant was born, which brought me closer to her again, first in a detached way, almost aseptic if that is how it can be defined as a passion. In two years we have achieved a quite good number of goals, an unexpected number of readers, followers, people from among the five continents that have appreciated our idea, our choices and our genuine passion, real and without prejudices related to names, ages, origins, experience, people who support us and await each new issue with curiosity and enthusiasm. And it’s only for them that at the end of a complicated year, for everyone, we are still here, despite the fact that many, too many, friends, co-founders, collaborators, have “dumped” us in this damned year, putting our backs to the wall, because, for those who do not know, this is not our “job”, or at least it is, but it’s not what allows us to eat, pay a mortgage or rent, buy some sometimes some clothes and ice-creams...

Yes, because isn’t a matter of hours worked, of ideas brought, or about “material” work done, but what allows you to carry out a good job that has heart and soul, are sharing, participation, discussion and comparison, are sharing, participation, discussion and comparison, all things that are suddenly disappeared and which have made the process of this issue longer and more complicated, because talking to a mirror often does not help to get the answers you are looking for. But I chose my pain, and for this reason, despite the difficulties, the lack of time, sleepless nights, illness and covid, the thousand doubts about contents, structure, what to remove and what put on, despite the head I burst out of what I felt dissatisfied with what I saw developing under my eyes, we went on, because after all we understood that the desire is not gone and that that flame still burns.

The anger and pain of seeing an infinity of mediocre “photographers”, without taste, nor soul, depopulated on social media and technological supports of all kinds, crappy self-proclaimed “photography gurus” who organize pathetic workshops for get little money by some incapable to whom young models, torn in pieces with talentless eyes and lenses, are given as meal. The pain of understanding that this digital world almost always rewards quantity in spite of quality (and Instagram, the platform that we use as main reference, is largely guilty), with tens of thousands of incapable people without taste, eye or technique, followed by other thousands of no taste and small culture people. And under this mountains of photographic rubbish are buried so many talented photographers, who do not and will never have the right recognition for their art and their talent, and mind it, I’m not talking about money, because that is not by far an evaluation parameter to us.

EDITORIAL

But I chose this pain for myself, I lost it and for some obscure reason I went to search for it, and now that I have found it again I think it will never abandon me. If you have chosen your pain too, and this pain is photography, then you are in the right place to share love, anger, passion, talent and ideas, we desperately need it, this world desperately need it. And now enjoy this number, the second of 2020 (yes, there are few, but the fucking covid has also marked us). We will try to be better and more punctual in 2021. News: we have eliminated the thematic sections, or rather, they are still in the belly of the whale, but they are no longer defined by a title, everything is mixed, to make the journey even more unpredictable. But it’s time to leave, and this time we don’t anticipate anything about the content, choose your pain and go...