Girl in red

March 9, 2013, Krakow, Poland.
A young woman has just bought some flowers from a street vendor.
For herself or to give as a gift? That is not the point... It denotes an attitude of conscious independence finally achieved. And yet, some “evil being” without too many scruples and animated by the worst intentions, seeing her in passing from the car window, would risk mistaking her for a prostitute waiting for a customer if, on that empty sidewalk, she did not have that bouquet in her hand that distinguishes her.
That day this thought did not touch me: if I decided to photograph her instantly it is because the instinct of the photographer suggested to me that she, that red spot of bright color, could be like a note of color noted by a painter or a musician in the score of the twilight of any cold evening, in the monotonous context of a Polish city.

I look at it now as an example for an iconographic image, right now that current news events are increasingly busy recording “gender violence” on a daily basis. Women are unfortunately the sacrificial victims of a male chauvinist society and a backward way of thinking that – with due exceptions – struggles to fully understand, respect and protect them.
This shot is part of the project Woman in love (a title I borrowed from a famous song by Barbra Streisand), my personal investigation into the female universe, made up of a selection of images designed with the collaboration of accomplice friends and, in other cases like this, captured in everyday reality. Images that would like to have the purpose of making people reflect and understand a universe that some men – perhaps due to culture, carelessness or, alas, predisposition – have not been educated and prepared enough to know by their families. The woman and her natural femininity, her precious contributions, her equal dignity with the man, as it should be naturally in this contemporary world. Even if only for a simple particle of empathic understanding, so necessary to build together, evolve and progress our community.


Luca Periotto
NP December 2024