The stories of the people

It happens to me, more and more often as I get older, to get interested in people and, on an unconscious level, in their stories. I don't know most of the subjects I meet and who I photograph for various reasons, but – more and more frequently – I try to identify myself, I observe them and think: «What would I be like if I were in their place?». In all this imagining and putting myself in the shoes of others, I happen to enter a more intimate dimension that sometimes makes me put the camera aside.

I observe and talk instead of photographing and people open up and start to tell. I then discover very beautiful stories, sometimes simple, other times more complex, but what always strikes me is that desire to tell almost everyone has it anywhere in the world. Sometimes it happens that communication is more complicated than expected. In the years I've spent traveling the world, I've learned to survive almost everywhere. I know Swahili, Arabic and Chinese, but I can't say I can speak. The only foreign language with which I get along well is English which fortunately, much more than in Italy, is spoken by everyone.

In 2013 I was in Nepal and I happened to photograph the owner of a small spice and vegetable shop. Observing the small quantity of products on display, I asked why it was so small. She told me that most of the vegetables for sale in her shop came from foraging. I pretended to understand but in reality, at the time, I didn't know what it was. The English term foraging indicates the practice of looking for food in natural areas not contaminated by pollution. Farmers from nearby villages brought every morning what they could find in the forest and she was concerned with selling it by dividing the proceeds with them. Foraging is an attitude that has always belonged to humans and animals, but requires a good knowledge of nature and what is harvested because not all plants are edible.

While I was walking in a small Nepalese village, I discovered quite by chance that until the end of the 1800s, the diet of the lower classes in Italy consisted largely of wild food. This made me reflect on how wild ingredients have therefore been a very important part of our culture and still today the basis of many recipes. I understood that harvesting wild food with awareness and knowledge is a way of economic sustenance with zero impact on the environment, but to do so it is necessary to have a good knowledge of the ecosystem, the dynamics that move it, botany and the territory. The most curious thing remains the fact that I discovered all of this right in that small Nepalese village. Then it occurred to me that perhaps, in addition to beauty, people's stories will save us.


Roberto Cristaudo
NP May 2023