The idea of a city

Some pictures are portraits of reality, some are portraits of a reality that lives in our own minds. This photo by Alessandro @buddy_bradley is both: he took it one day in Milan, in a morning suffused with haze and white light. For some reasons it’s exactly Milan in a winter morning, for others is “The idea that you’ve got of a city in winter”. The fist time I saw it I thought it was taken from a movie set: perfect and balanced, everything in its right place. Then I realized it was like that because it’s a photo of the idea of a city in winter. Maybe the light was not so cold that day but it was just like that: in my mind and in Buddy’s photo. He is Buddy since 2008, but he was born Alessandro. He’s been assistant director, illustrator and graphic designer. Now he works as art director and digital strategist for an agency in Milan. What’s Italy for him? “Italy is the country where I was born and that I love and hate. It is a space of cultural, political and economic subsets as rich and fascinating as they are often unable to talk to each others. Its literature is open to diversity inside and outside, his hypocritical narcissism and bigotry increasingly closed it to the rest of the world. Italy is the beautiful mother who raised me and who now no longer answers me on the phone. Each day I tell myself ‘Do not forget to play.’, that’s my mantra.”