If you prefer, let us call them emotions. Emotions that rise up from the lens of Luciano Usai. Except, he is the only special effect here. He takes his camera and paints. No airbrush required. It is not necessary. His art and his technique are all in his hands and in his immeasurable patience and disturbing sensitivity.
Dance of the World
Constantly swinging between Sense and Sensibility, the camera lens of Usai (born in La Maddalena in 1972) transforms into an ecstatic vision of brush strokes, movement, and stills. An ideal tool to portray dance. Usai studied dance for three years to have a better understanding of movement and stillness. He became the photographer of the National Dance Academy and many other important schools. He is thus able to capture the heart of the art as it unfolds, as in a great act of love. When we talk about the heart of dance, this brings to mind the Japanese choreographer Akira Kasai: “Think about love. There’s a huge difference between thinking and acting. Swinging between these two states creates a vacuum, an area of crisis where every balance is compromised. That’s where the dancer wants to move his audience.” And that is where Luciano’s eye-lens transforms, depicting time as instant or infinite. Pure images explode into life under the natural light of things and people, born from a unique, tender passionate, ironic and unstoppable vision of the world.
Luciano Usai is a passionate and critical eye on the event and on the people around the world.
His photography tells, in a kind of dance, a series of movements, observations, reflections. It is an endless journey to the boundaries of reality that, through his lens, has the merit and the astonishment to become truth. Fragments of worlds that are moments of light, mosaics of glances and bodies. In a village like in a continent; China, Thailand, Chile, Africa and his unlimited love for the Cambodian people are no longer unknown places but places with a soul that is not stolen, but astonishingly relieved.
The organism of brain, heart and camera of Luciano Usai follows important humanitarian and social aims. Usai is a teaching professor at the International Academy of High Fashion and Costume Koefia in Rome. He teached the art of photography to women and children in war areas or in places where the reportage it’s a way to educate, sometimes to survive, to tell and to understand one’s identity, one’s destiny. Destiny that can be changed thanks to a snapshot.
Luciano Usai by Riccardo Palmieri