In 2018 I attended a photography class organized by MOME. My goal was to get closer to how photography as a form of art works.

I consider myself a hobby photographer, I take photos mostly for my pure joy. I have not held any professional or amateur exhibition before, but as the closing ceremony of this course I showed my exam photo series to a small audience along with my fellow classmates of 12 people.

At least that was the plan, but unfortunately the exhibition lasted only a couple of hours. So my intent of inviting friends to check my photos failed miserably. I was angry, I was pissed off on how short sighted the organizers were. All of us were angry back then.

Two ideas came to light that night. The first was that I can create a virtual exhibition to show all the photos from all the classmates. So at least on the web we can can have our corner to invite our friends into. The second one was creating a photography coaching service for people like us in need for guidance to open wings and fly.

This post is about the first idea. Back to the photos as I want to introduce them a bit. The title of the task we had to accomplish was: “Dream, Ecstasy, Vision”. Behind this vague definition the real goal was to find something that motivates us and gives the photos some direction and cohesion. Under this umbrella we had to form our message or theme we wanted to express. So as you will see we all chose different topics for our “thesis”.

I’ve found mine while I was commuting to work and back home on the underground lines. The lack of interaction or rather avoiding interaction between fellow commuters was something I always felt, but I had never catch it on any photo. So I started taking photos during my travels using my phone. I was quite nervous at the beginning, but it wore off in time and I started enjoying it. I tried out different ideas and two remained: the censored style and the panoramic one. The former came first as I took my first couple of photos through the window of the train while I was standing inside. People’s eyes were “censored” by the black window separators on some of the photos and that was the moment I realized the connection: commuters are trying to censor what they want to see and whom they want to interact with and that gives everyone the needed comfortable solitude.

The panoramic photos came later and it took me some time to practice the technique, also I had to post-process these photos a lot; all them were blended from at least two or more panorama shots.

Finally some technical details about the site: I chose to use PotoSwipe to handle the image show and all the interactions. I created the “design” from scratch. My goal was to create a very minimalistic site and put the spotlight to the individual galleries, as they are the main attraction. My secondary goal was to have a decent mobile viewing experience, similar what you can get on your mobile OS *photos app.

And now, here is the link to the Foto2.0 gallery page. I hope you’ll enjoy the photos.