Alex Foolery was born in Catania, Sicily and is now 24 years old.
He started photographing in 2010 with an old mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson Z1010, to send multimedia messages that could outweigh the standard of a normal text message, so, Alex says, « I could photograph what I did or saw in the perspective of a Better communication with my friends » and could send stronger messages that fully described what was happening around him.
He has a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Sciences at the University of Catania with a thesis entitled “Synchronize Photography with Instagram, a new visual approach.” Today he works at the Enkant photographic studio and teaches Social Media Manager and Photography At the Euromediterranean Harim Academy in Catania.
« Sicilian Sea » is an unfinished project, started in May 2016. It’s a personal visual path, for the public, the Sicilian sea and the people that are related to it, it shows Etna, a part of the Saracena coast, places such as Aci Castello or Syracuse. Sicily, however, is far more than this, the photographer knows. Second, this work is also a personal exercise, a “cure,” Alex says, to learn how to love the sea. For the photographer, visiting several seaside resorts is the process of a healing therapy, a way to chase hatred for the seaside. In Sicily to go to the sea is not so easy, it isn’t exactly next door for everyone. For Alex the heat has always been a problem. Sit on the seat of the car and touch the boiling steering wheel, lower the windows and hope to get some wind, that wind that refuses to blow, hear the sound of the horn, see the confusion in the streets. Especially when you come near the sea, sweaty, warm, with the desire to bathe and feel rejection, as soon as you dive your feet in the water. Is it a problem? Maybe. The sand inside the costume, between the fingers, behind the knees, the salt on the skin that begins to pinch as soon as you wear the clothes, the stones under your feet, the fingers burning with sunscreen.
Aware of this difficulty, he has decided to plan a photographic exercise during the summer of 2016. For three months he has been forced to go to the sea almost every day, to experience, to drift among people, to try to overcome that I get annoyed by taking photographs. His intention was to photograph because photographing was a way to make him forget about the sea and the fact he was on the beach all day, because it made him think about his photographic work only. That way, he progressively began to appreciate those moments, because the strong lines of hate seemed to slowly disappear and melt into a new and different feeling that Alex still can not describe.
To accomplish this and all his other projects, Alex has always used the smartphone camera as a recording medium, because he believes that it offers many advantages such as being a way to dissimulate the act of photographing, and melt him into the crowd.
Alex is convinced that without the camera of his mobile phone (his smartphone) he could not make these photos. Equally certain that with a camera it would change the perception of its presence to other people. He believes that using a quick and versatile medium as a smartphone can give him the opportunity to fit into the different spaces, integrating himself entirely within the social contexts. For him, a phone has a different power than a reflection because of the experience that “people have always perceived the cell phone as a normal and banal object , and as a personal accessory we cannot be deprived of, such as a pair of glasses or a pacemaker “(M. Smargiassi, Blog of La Repubblica, 03/04/2017). This is because, according to him, the classic camera is a tool that seems to have a personality in itself, while the cell phone, as an object that people always carry in their pockets, is seen as a sort of extension of our body. [Official Website]
