Art series by Sofia Podestà // This series was taken during my Icelandic travel last summer. I’ve always dreamt of traveling in Iceland.
Writing and photographs by Sofia Podestà
I am Sofia Podestà, an Italian photographer based in Rome and I’m 25. My life is divided between college, where I’m completing a major in the history of photography, and photography itself.
I started taking pictures when I was a teen and I’ve never stopped. My works are mostly focused on my travels; they are like a kind of a travel diary. I’ve spent all of my summer holidays in the mountains since I was a child, so I developed a deep feeling of connection with nature that I’ve found is what inspires me most. I like to define my landscapes as “emotional landscapes” because through them I can express all my feelings, even better than with words.
This series was taken during my Icelandic travel last summer. I’ve always dreamt of traveling in Iceland. The wide open spaces, desolation, colours, and atmosphere of being on another planet are what attracted me most. This series is my attempt to reproduce the great sense of agoraphobia that you can find there. Agoraphobia is a type of anxiety disorder in which you often fear great open spaces. The anxiety is caused by fear that there’s no easy way to escape or seek help if you need it. In Iceland you can be on the road for miles, without any village or gasoline station anywhere nearby, so you might feel the anxiety of being abandoned and half the world away from everything.
Hi Sophie,
I;m looking into this series of photos as part of my university project, particularly looking at capturing the relationship between open and closed spaces, and the impact they have on the mind.
Looking at these photos, I definitely feel some sense of anxiety, but I can’t quite pinpoint what creates those feelings.
From your own perspective, how do you feel you created that sense of anxiety in these photos