Every year for Christmas I dedicated time and efforts to create a Christmas image. Usually a still life with plenty of symbolic contents and often references to the year main events. If you are curious to check them, last year I posted on my blog all the images I made in the last 20 years.

This year I kept it very simple, with a winter picture I took few days ago with a Pentax 67 with a 45mm and an Ilford FP4 film. A landscape, less then a mile far from my Italian home.

I’m in a kind of sabbatical period, staying at my 91 years old father home taking care of him, and I dedicate myself to photographic personal research and books writing when I have the time. Obviously he is my priority and in December I simply had not the option to subtract time from him to create a Christmas still life.

Mentally, staying far from the professional duties, I also started to look for simplicity and film photography is part of this research for a simple way to photograph, far from hours of retouch and the computer. A slow method, perfect for the rhythm of life I have to follow lately.

This Christmas for me is very simple, I was not even able to find a real (I hate fake ones) Christmas tree and last week was spent in and out of hospitals, with a couple of days fighting the socialist italian health care system. So my Christmas, as the picture, is a little empty and without decorations, it is reduced at the essence, a family moment where the importance is to give and help.

Around there is the snow, and all is quite, the winter time is ticking slowly and the world is waiting for the first signs of spring to bloom and reborn following the cycle of life, an analogue cycle that requires time, patience and love.