On his travels around the world, photographer Carlo Orsi took with him the beautiful Three Sixty table lamp, designed by Foster+Partners and produced by FontanaArte. Placed in a wide variety of settings, almost as if it were an extension of his own camera, he captured it in a sequence of black and white images, shot after shot.

But did Orsi photograph the lamp or the surrounding landscapes that he skillfully orchestrated as backdrops?

It is surprising that the object that served as a pretext for this journey around the wonders of the world is, at the end of this adventure, almost always disconnected from the atmospheres and spirit evoked by the scenes that emerge from the printed film.

The lamp, beautiful and intelligent as it may be, resting on the bare ground of India or on the improvised granite supports of the American mountains, is detached from the atmosphere that characterizes its surroundings.

There is a deliberate detachment between this design object, seeking unlikely publicity in a globalized world, and the specificity of the scenes and landscapes that continue to speak of the inevitability of local presences and memories. There is no complicity between the “lamp” object, the source of this attention, and the emotions that the portrayed territories manage to convey.

Carlo Orsi is a photographer of intense experiences and authentic worlds; the ethical rigor of his shots is superior to the mere aesthetic satisfaction of his images.

The poetry of the contexts and the intensity of the scenes that the photographer presents push the observer to feel like the protagonist of this adventure; only later does the “foreign” presence of that object-subject, so distant from the space of the scene being narrated, come to the fore.

That lamp portrayed is a sign of our culture, of our identity; it symbolizes the part of ourselves that is irretrievably distant from the balance and cultures of that photographed humanity, of which we can only perceive a distant echo.