Photo Journal Monday: Christian Sanna
All text and images by: Christian Sanna
I am a Malagasy-Italian photographer from Nosy Be Island in the northern region of Madagascar. I express what I call sentimental photography, where I borrow the codes of documentary photography but with a narrative around intimate emotions and a sensitive reading of reality.
From my childhood I have felt not belonging on both sides, a perpetual source of conflicts and questions. This very early on resulted in the need to leave Nosy Be, where my family settled just after I was born, and later to leave Madagascar to go live and study in France. I hoped the estrangement would silence my plural identities, but uneasiness set in. Voluntary exile, here I am uprooted. Bitter nostalgia. Then came photography and art.
I then returned to Madagascar, little by little, through several trips, with photography and art as companions. From these stays are born images, moments cut out in reality, guided by emotions which resurface, feelings and memories of my past. In Madagascar, Embona is the word for nostalgia and reminiscence but also a name. This series, “Letters to Embona”, is for them.
These letters are a one-way letter correspondence. I talk about my feelings toward this island with faces and landscapes, trying to bring out my memories and fragile emotions. These images are not staged, they are taken as I encounter them, they are like echoes of feelings that resonate in me, like scraps of autobiography scattered over this territory that has become foreign to me. In this still shy conversation, Embona is the recipient of my contradictory feelings, where sadness, nostalgia, anger and attachment mixed.
