About Yuro De Iuliis
Our guest today is Yuro De Iuliis. Aside from photography, Yuro is a doctor in the emergency department at the local hospital in Pescara – a town by Italy’s Adriatic Sea.
Yuro describes himself as a “reader of photographic images” since leafing through his father’s National Geographic magazines as a child.
Influenced by photography as diverse as Guy Bourdin’s sexy fashion to Harry Callahan’s experimentalism to Lorca DiCorcia’s staged cinematics, Yuro reflects the same versatility in his photography.
“I especially love street photography, intended as an aesthetic aptitude to capture the complexity of human places and gestures. Space, objects and human presence are the elements that fascinate me, and the photographic image, with its ambiguous field of vision, is the ideal instrument to explore its inchoerent and sometimes mysterious aspects.”
Let’s hear from Yuro about making his image which was nominated as single image finalist in the Italian Street Photography Festival 2018
Making Of
Where and when did you make the photo, is it a new or familiar location to you?
First of all, thank you very much for this interview. So let’s start, I took this picture during a quiet, ordinary evening in March 2017, in a place very familiar to me: in the parking lot of a shopping center near my house.
This photo certainly reflects my aim to use photography to explore everyday life, not in terms of a mere document, but as an attempt to create a mental topography of the places I know and live every day, almost a diary in images but without captions and explanations and for this more ambiguous than words.
What was your point of interest? Did you prepare or was it spontaneous?
The photo was absolutely spontaneous, indeed, totally unexpected. As I was saying: I had just parked in the lot surrounding the local mall, and I immediately noticed an enchanting light, in that blue hour of the sunset of almost spring, so radiant and at the same time full of shadows. So I decided to stay out in the parking lot while my wife was shopping, looking for the right opportunity for a shot; and my son decided to keep me company.
I was evaluating the usual inventory of possibilities of this potentially fruitful situation (the small flow of people between the sliding doors of the mall, the cutting light on a group of abandoned shopping carts) but I didn’t find nothing good. In the meantime my son was buzzing around me trying to catch me in one of his games.
Suddenly I realized that he was hiding behind a huge waste bin, which seemed to open with a big red mouth: an exceeding, alarming red. I turned to my son pretending not to see him and he exploded from behind the bin in a coarse laugh and making me grimaces. And was done!
I feel just a little guilty for pretending to participate in the game of my son when I just wanted to take the picture that I had in mind. But basically this was my game and, accepting that unexpected moment, I asked him to participate.
Was it one shot or did you make more than one exposure?
Reviewing my archive and the folder that contains the files of that day I realize I have taken only two photos: the one that I chose and another one in which is the arm of my son that is coming out of the “mouth” of the trash can.
Can you recall your thoughts and why you made the photo this way?
When you go out of your house even just for shopping, and you always carry a photographic bag with you, the prevailing mood is dominated by that strange nervousness, sometimes tending to neurosis, to look incessantly for possible images. Although I do not remember exactly, I assume that my mood was that. However I remember a really nice evening. And I was very happy to have taken that picture whose beauty I noticed immediately.
Why did I shoot it like this? I think we are never completely master and aware of the photographic act. Anyone who loves to photograph brings together certain ways of shooting over the years, modes that are the result of readings of other images, continuous and often unconscious influences, randomness, errors and experience. I can certainly say to prefer the use of flash (which in this photo is very obvious) for its ability to strongly report the presence of the photographer’s eye, a kind of light that is never neutral, and frees images from pretensions of faithful representation of the world, and replaces to the naive mimesis the complex seduction of a mental image.
What camera, lens and settings did you choose?
In this photo I used what is still my usual equipment: a Nikon D610 camera with a 24-85 lens (which I don’t use almost never over 45 mm, and used here at 24 mm), with a Nissin Di700a flash mounted on the camera sled. The coupled time / aperture was as follows: f22 with a time of 1/125 to 80 ISO sensitivity. I’ve definitely underexposed to enhance the darkness of the background and intensify the red in the foreground.
What kind of post-processing did you do, if any?
For the development of my RAW files I have always used Lightroom software that over the years I have tried to learn how to use to achieve the color rendering I had in mind.
What did you take away and learn from making this picture?
I like a lot the Garry Winogrand’s quote in which he said that he took pictures to see what the world looked like in photographs. In every photograph of mine of whom I’m quite satisfied I learn the truth of this sentence.
Thank You for your time and the Interview Yuro!