A Fist Full of Film

Silvia on the Island of Giglio

When you get off a plane and you hear the words:  ”Welcome, I will be your translator and guide.”  And then you brush off to a black mercedes driven with a man in a dark suit.  There is something novel about the whole picture.  So you are speeding along the countryside trying to make the last ferry, and she’s speaking to you in English with a slight accent.  Then at the first rest stop, she begins explaining custom, nouns, and phrases, and then suddenly, I’m realizing the education I’m about to have.

I ate so well during that job.  I drank and ate combinations of food I’d never had before, and finally understood why an Americano is an Americano.  And drinking at a coffee bar is both the norm and quite interesting.  Man that coffee was good.  Man that seafood was good.  Man those breakfast rolls were good.  Man that mueslix was good.  Man that pasta was good.  Man that wine was good.  And I experienced all that because Silvia allowed us to experience new things from the perspective of an American since she lived in SF.  

All the tension of being abroad, of not knowing the language was put to ease, she was able to not just translate a language, but teach us a culture, complete with expressions and idioms.  Our employer, brought us to Silvia, due to the shipwreck of Costa Concordia, and this photograph was taken at the lighthouse well in view of the wreck.  We were in press conferences, and documenting the drama as it unfolded for certain aspects of the wreck which I’m not at liberty to speak of.  But all that was just a backdrop to being there.

In LA, we do so much running and running, that life on this tuscan island was a welcome change.  Shitty wifi, combined with no traffic and only one or two restaurants you would rather be, make for a relaxing evening of no choices except what dishes to choose.  And Silvia taught us as much as we could retain, about how things are spoken and done.  

But the best part of the whole trip is that even though we are set into our roles, mine as what I was paid to do there, and hers, and everyone else’s, experiencing different people makes you realize that they might as well be in LA or Orlando or Minneapolis or wherever.  That at our very core, we are just people with dreams, with passions, with desires of things not yet materialized.  And even though we were sent to cover the tragedy that was ongoing, that it didn’t define who we were.  So even though she operated as a liaison for the little bird Americans, she was an Art History aficionado.  As so was I.  So having a detailed conversation about Caravaggio, after being in hotel in the shadow of one of the Medici castles, is pretty damn cool.  

But only after all the work at hand did any of these ideas have a chance to come up.  We Americans really put a lot into our work, and it can define us at times, and most times overtake us.  Good conversation, good food and wine, and intellectual thought shared with people from outside the comfort zone, can do wonders for your awareness and your world view.  And it can put you at peace living right now.  By just showing us around, this notion pervaded the things Silvia taught us.  Combine that with being on an island, I learned to relax a little bit, in probably the most continuous and physically demanding project I’ve been apart of as of late.

We were looking for passage to get to a certain area around the sunken ship, and I had my Rolleiflex out, and I lined up a shot with the ship in the background and her, and she said, “No, don’t get me with the ship!”  Again it made me realize that this job didn’t define us, and I was just a tourist here.  So a few minutes later I snapped this shot, emblematic considering how much light and stability Silvia applied to the chaos we were running head long into between the government, the world media, and the locals.   I thought it a more fitting background.  

Thank you Silvia for taking care of the “Two birds.”

Port of Giglio, Italia

Rolleiflex 2.8E Schneider-Krueznach 80mm Portra 160NC