Lorenzo Meloni The discolored portraits from the obituary announcements of the Eco di Bergamo newspaper. During the Covid-19 crisis in Bergamo, the local newspaper printed as many as 12 pages of obituaries a day.
(...) Office of the printing press of the Eco di Bergamo newspaper. Erbusco, Italy. April 6, 2020.
“I've always been passionate about science fiction, because science fiction has always been a way for man to imagine the future. In a certain sense, this imagining also means seeing the afterlife in the future.
As soon as the pandemic broke out I took a car and drove from France to northern Italy. Life in France at that time still flowed normally, as if nothing had changed, while in Italy the streets were empty and silent and I felt like I was in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian atmosphere. Meanwhile, images of coffins began to fill the front pages of the newspapers and the volume of their obituary announcements increased day by day.
When I found myself inside a newspaper’s printing press and I saw the last printed pages of the obituary gradually fading away, just as life was in this dystopian world, I felt that that was the image I was looking for in order to represent the absurdity of this new world in which we are living — the world of the pandemic.”
– Lorenzo Meloni © Lorenzo Meloni | Magnum Photos
