Andrea Pugiotto is an Italian photographer. Ever since his childhood, he has dreamt of visiting Alaska. He did so in 2016, for a whole month. The result was called The End of the Road, a portrait of an unknown land, far from the clichéd vision of frozen landscapes.
Andrea Pugiotto defines himself as a story-teller. His interest for photography was born in the Venice airport, where he worked after graduating high school. There, the constant flow of travellers fascinated him, and he started noticing several faces. “I like imagining their thoughts, just by looking at them”, he explains. “I then started taking imaginary pictures from each of these encounters”. This is when photography came as an evidence, as a mean to tell a story, and to place those characters in a landscape that would suit them.
In 2016, he travelled to Alaska in summer, a State that had fascinated him ever since this childhood. The greatness of the territory and its unique atmosphere inspired him to take out his camera and start a new narrative, this time more personal. “Alaska is completely different from what you would expect. It is both a beginning and an end, pushed around you, and we become beings projected into this immensity”.
In a child’s eyes
Andrea’s depiction of Alaska is moving. A vision that is both intimate and lonely. Nature dialogues with the softened lights of cafés. Outside, the snow has given away, replaced by the rain, and summer transforms the State into an unknown land. “It was a child’s dream to get lost in the wilderness, between polar bears and glaciers”, the photographer tells us. “I have waited for so long, and yet, even so I was not ready. Alaska was a wonderful surprise, and I tried to capture this astonishment in my photos”.
The End of the Road reveals a strange land, far from the usual landscapes, a place where men and their environment found another way to live together. “I didn’t want to photograph a clichéd, superficial Alaska. It is, on the contrary, a beautiful place, where men are respectful of nature. A territory where all species are linked together”, Andrea describes. Rocked by the dreams of his youth, the photographer wrote a travel notebook oscillating between tenderness and wonder. “In Alaska, we are both big and small. And I, I live. Wild and free”, he concludes.
© Andrea Pugiotto
