In Our Time - Fragments of the Present

THE UNNAMABLE PRESENT HAD INTELLECTUALIZED THAT THIS WAS THE AGE OF INCONSISTENCY. The "weight of the silent light" was enough for me, and it's all I immersed myself in to understand anything. We all walk with our heads down in a world that has ceased to belong to us, despite being entirely fabricated by us. This is the vertigo of the Anthropocene: the sensation of being intruders in a house we have built with our own hands. In the images that follow, my camera does not seek a shouted denunciation, but lingers on the "geography of the everyday," which Robert Adams interpreted as a secular prayer amid the rubble of the West. There is a painful dignity in the trunk of a tree imprisoned by ice, a biological still that questions our patience. It is an image that Peter Handke would have described as a "moment of true sensation," where nature is no longer a backdrop, but a body subjected to our chronology. Not far away, consumption becomes an act of exposed butchery: the hanging flesh, naked and brutal, reminds us that our appetite has redrawn the boundaries between species, transforming the animal into pure matter, an inventory of muscles and tendons under an indifferent sun. In Buenos Aires, I met an elderly woman as she looked up at a wall. The writing demands a distribution of wealth that seems to belong to a different, almost mythological, geological era. It is here, in this gap between peeling concrete and human desire, that the Anthropocene becomes humanist.

WE ARE NOT JUST ATMOSPHERIC AGENTS; we are creatures searching for meaning as waste piles up against the walls of buildings that already look like archaeological finds. I agree with Teju Cole (Nigerian photographer and writer), who maintains that photography is nothing more than a way of "bringing the world to light" to see if it is still there. These images are fragments of a journey through a landscape that is changing. We observe the rubble, the ice, the blood, and the asphalt not out of despair, but to relearn how to inhabit the visible. Ultimately, the beauty that remains—that grazing light caressing a horse on a desert road, or a paper bag carried like a sacred burden—is the only compass we have left to orient ourselves in this new age of iron and silence.
 

Text and photos by Luca Periotto
NP January 2026