“I feel human again”. Fedele is one of the homeless photographers who took part in the projects “13 storie dalla strada. Fotografi senza dimora”. This exhibition, on show at the Galerie d’Italia until 1 September 2019, has been organised by the Cariplo Foundation together with the non-profit organisation Ri-scatti, an association that promotes social integration projects through photography. The focus thus became the point of view of people who are used to being defined for their shortcomings: jobless, homeless, without a future. As one of the homeless photographers, Dario, says: “Photography has changed my attitude, the way I see the world. The necessity to find attractive things to photograph forced me to seek beauty in things. I was no longer playing a passive role in life; I had become a seeker of beauty”.

The curator of the exhibition Dalia Gallico explains: “We have chosen 13 stories from more than 1500 projects that the Cariplo Foundation supports every year, and we have presented them with the photographs of thirteen photographers without fixed abode, trained by the photographers from Witness Journal. These photographers represent the 200 thousand in Milan who are unemployed, or the 21 thousand children who live in poverty”.

The exhibition is set out like a narration in episodes, in a story of stories. The individual projects vary greatly, from the sustainable ecological projects of high-school students to the boxing clubs dedicated to adolescents and young people suffering personal difficulty and social fragility, to talents fleeing abroad and support for the disabled.

The photographs are almost all of men and women in action, almost never posed. Federica Balestrieri from the non-profit organisation Ri-scatti explains: “For these thirteen people without fixed abode, photography has been a source of self-confidence and trust”. An exhibition in which the photographs seem to come from the heart, because they present life on the street with feeling, and with an extraordinary sense of empathy and closeness. “We may not see masterpieces from great photographers, but we will bear witness to a rarer wonder. We will see photographs that are beautiful because those who took them have used that glimmer of light to rise from the depths, and they have transformed it into a photograph, a source of redemption”, explained the president of the Cariplo Foundation Giuseppe Guzzetti.