Gianmarco Maraviglia
Winter Came in Spring
We’ve seen the masks. We’ve seen hospitals and cemeteries. As always happens as reaction to a dramatic event there are different stages, different approaches. Then there is the everyday life. The search for a new normal, new rhythms, something to hold on to pretend that everything is fine.
Most of our life certainty is nothing more than repetitions. The alarm clock that rings at the same time, children go to school, cooking in the evening, going to bed knowing what is going to happen the next day. A kind of rhythm of existence. But when rhythm breaks down, it turns out how fragile is the balance we base our lives on. On the other side, leaving this safety zone forces you to find new dynamics, to search for new geometries from chaos.
As in an unexpected chemical reaction, the elements seek a new stability, a new order. Covid has already brought about enormous changes in our society, and the humans appear again capable of adapting with extreme speed, in search of a new balance. The same dynamics are found in a family, closed at home for two months, looking for a new form of everyday life.
Here in Milano, Lombardia, Italy – perhaps the most affected area in the world by the new coronavirus – this year here winter came in spring. Italy has been in a lock down situation for two months now. The emergency laws enacted by the government are among the most restrictive in the world. You cannot leave the house without a self-certification, and only for urgent reasons. As a photojournalist I worked on the news, on the empty streets, on the masks … But as a narrator I could do nothing but visually tell the changes that were happening quickly around me.
Bio
A humanistic background allows me to get closer to the stories I tell with the respect that every person deserves, respect for being told for what they really are, avoiding the path of visual spectacle of pain or poverty. I believe in the value of information as the first thing, for this reason my research does not stop only to the dramatic stories, because our world is fortunately still able to offer stories of great redemption, of rebirths, stories not yet told but that give hope for the future. I have the pleasure of working with magazines like Der Spiegel, Washington Post, CNN, Corriere Della Sera, Io Donna, Mare, Cicero and many others. I’m the proud founder of the non-fiction communication and brand journalism collective Jolly Jolly Grog. I’m also a teacher of photojournalism at IED Milano and Officine Fotografiche. I hope to leave a better world to my two kids, Olivia and Yago.
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