As we open the folders and scroll through the photographs, I begin to grasp the importance of this collection. The shots we choose focus in particular on the period between 1975 and 1995, but they cover a broader period ranging from the 1960s to the 2000s. The collection contains portraits of actresses, singers, artists, and intellectuals in their youth, images that surprise me when compared to the idea I have of them today; some portraits are studio shots, others are taken in more intimate and personal settings. Of the former, Orsi captures the intense gazes of those who maintain their mask, remaining characters, stars, and the playful gazes of those who allow themselves to be penetrated and struck by the softer lighting used here. In the outdoor photographs, taken in streets and living rooms, the photographer demonstrates his ability to establish friendly relationships with his subjects and to portray them in private moments, such as Tadini and Adami while they are creating in their studios.

When looking at portrait photographs, we tend to forget who took them and focus instead on the subjects. […] So let's try to look at the portraits taken by Carlo Orsi, resisting the temptation to peek at the captions that indicate names, dates, and places […]. The first thing that immediately catches the eye is the photographer's skill in avoiding repetition, that is, in not using a sort of aesthetic model within which to place any subject regardless of its characteristics. This probably stems from his involvement in the fashion world, which encourages photographers to constantly come up with new ideas, and from his spirit as a talented photojournalist, which leads him to consider people not only as individuals but also, and above all, as elements of the world to which they belong. […] Indeed, because a portraitist is not someone who simply puts a face in the center of their viewfinder—this, for example, is why no one really recognizes themselves in a passport photo that seems inadequate and banal because it is—but someone who is able to establish a process of mutual complicity with ‘their’ subject. It is a dialectical relationship made up of many small but important nuances, because the subject alternates between a willingness to reveal their inner self and moments of understandable reluctance, while the photographer, alternating between tact and determination, tries to identify that certain something that will transform a snapshot into a true portrait, one in which both the person and the photographer feel mutually fulfilled.