Hello, I’m Tao.
This is a very personal project—yes there’s Yoko whom I have been living and working with for the past 18 years, always helping me to say NO other than YES or URRRR or HMMMM to things I’m not sure about—yet it is still personal, due to the fact that I am the one holding up the camera, pressing the shutter button within a certain 1/250 or 1/4000 of a second, by which a photo is taken.
No matter how many people are taking how many photos how frequently today, these moments are still special to me.
By no means I’m a good photographer: I have only one camera, one lens (which came with the camera) and I seldom, if not never, wait in the bush for The Moment to come. And I don’t drive a car. I just walk. A lot.
During the 10 years living in this Italian pre-alps village called Pasturo, one thing I’ve got to know is that, nature is generous enough to offer the same amount of—infinity—to someone even like me. Believe or not, you just need to be there, no matter you move or you don’t move or you move very slowly and carefully, everything comes to you anyway. In nature, every moment is The Moment.
When enough moments are captured and stored, stories appear. So Yoko and I decided to select about 15 photos every month, and try to tell a story.
We hope you like it. ∎
ISSUE 1, May 2024
The Cold Days of Spring
The story of spring is rather complicated.
In the silence and the darkness and the death, we see the first bud of Primula. So we think and we know: Everything here is awakening; everything not here is coming back.
Then we hear the first song of great tit. Then we hear the first song of wren. Then we hear the first song of chaffinch. Then we see the first group of crag martin—how joyful they are! Then we hear the first song of song thrush (and we record it). Then blackcap and serin.
Then there is the cold, cold rain. For a week or so. Black birds and robins are singing their hearts out to stop the rain, while the other songs just disappeared, again.
Then there is the snow.
Bramblings gathered and waited and waited and gathered.
Until the first sunny day!
Then comes barn swallow and redstart, and bonelli’s warbler, and cuckoo. Yes, cuckoo is the ultimate confirmation: spring is here.
We should accept that the cold days of spring are the days of hope.
Shall we go there?
30 March 2023
From Alpe Cova we can always see this magnificent Norway spruce at the other side of the valley. But of course, not always with the cloud. Under the spruce there is a Baita (mountain hut). Watching the transformation of the cloud, we had decided to visit there. A week later, we were there.
The turn-around view
07 April 2018
When we walk from Introbio to Alpe Daggio, the only way to see Grigna is to turn around. If we only have the destination—usually the top of a mountain—in our mind, we would turn around only when we reached the top. And if that’s the case, we would never have seen this: Framed by beeches, the north-eastern face of Grigna lit up by the morning sun which in return lit up the sky.
Alpe Daggio
07 April 2018
Nothing can stop us believing here is the home of black grouse. We believe so much that we can really see her there and hear him right over there. There! But nothing. Only this beautiful beech, not even bother to ask why we want to see the black grouse.
The right rain
30 April 2023
When the rain is right, I have the interest which might come from the belief that my camera will be fine—to photo it. And when the rain is right, I am already out there with my camera. Oh yes that’s the right rain.
Sleeping spirits
14 April 2020
Wood anemones are the spirits of the spring woods. Now thousands of them are napping. You walk by as quiet as possible. The crackling of the fallen leaves then becomes so, so loud.
A female cuckoo
08 May 2021
The mother of the children of many other birds. She has several beautiful necklaces on her neck and a very different call from the male’s “cuc-koo”, which David Attenborough described as “bathwater gurgling down a plughole”. This one comes back to Pialeral every spring. She has already found her nest.
A mullein
09 March 2023
I checked: it’s not the blurriness of my focus, it’s the blurriness of this mullein. The tiny little hairs make her look like the warmest one on this chilly shady hillside.
Of course we touched it.
Tevena
16 March 2023
At a lower altitude close to the village, a retired hunter pointed up to a solitude Norway spruce in Tevena and told us: over there, look for the red deer. We went there the second day, no traces of red deer but a red fox searching for food, with an alpine chamois grazing relaxingly about twenty meters away.
Even though we’ve already known the answer, we cannot help but wondering every time, as a complain: why they are not afraid of each other but all afraid of us?
April snow
13 April 2023
The snow of spring is a transparent snow. It won’t accumulate much. It’s more in the air than on the ground. It gives a grainy texture to everything: the colour of meadows, the song of robins, and the early sprouts of larches.
Brambling
10 March 2024
When you see a large flock of birds in the valley, you thought they must be goldfinches, because they just talk so much, that one becomes two, two become four, four become eight…what a flock! Maybe you are right, but when you see 50, 60, or 100 little dots flying together, most probably, they are bramblings. They are about to leave, to the north. Chaffinches say good-bye, in Italian.
Birch and moon
28 March 2023
There is this magical birch woods in Piazza Spinola. It’s not big, but something we couldn’t see—not the buds or seeds for sure—attracts so many different small birds, all at once. Here must be the metropolis of birds, except the sound of it being way better than the man-made one. Just listen: great tits, long-tailed tits, blue tits, marsh tits, coal tits, goldcrests, chiff-chaffs… It’s the most musical woods we’ve ever visited, which even makes the moon look a bit different.
Mist
30 March 2023
If you want some mysteries, ask the mist. On a sunny day, behind these three trees there is only the sky, because they are on a ridge. But once the mist arrived, behind, or within the mist, there is everything. It mustn’t be a coincidence that you can also see mistle thrushes here in the summer, not because of the mist, probably.
A black woodpecker
10 April 2024
When we notice a new bird, there are two possibilities. One, he/she has never been here. Two, we have never noticed him/her. For us, the first black woodpecker appeared at the fifth year after we came here. Then there are more and more.
He has two distinctive calls. He sounds like a huge cricket when flies, we think. And he sounds like a wounded buzzard when he perches, our friend Claudio thinks.
Prints of photos of the current issue (and only the current issue) is available for sale. Every photo will be carefully printed, signed, packed and posted by ourselves from our home studio in Pasturo, Italy.
Printing is a serious matter.
I bought a professional photo printer back in 2020. The reason I did it was that our neighbour Carlo and Teresa, a couple in their 80s, asked me to take a photo of their beautiful flowering cactus, and I didn’t want to show it to them on a screen(believe me I tried), but to give them the photo—as a photo.
Then I got to know, a good photo is not equal to a good print. Vice versa. The thing is, screens are different from papers. Screens release light and papers reflect light, screens are made of glass and papers are with countless textures. To get a good print, firstly I need to have all the decisions I made on the screen shown correctly on the paper—especially the colour; then I need to make all the other decisions for the paper itself: ink, dimension, texture, storage, cutting, framing, etc., etc… And of course, the cost.
After four years of learning, tweaking and testing, I think I am finally befriended with my printer. So now, yes, we can print.
SUPPORT
This is an independent project, so if you find it interesting and want to make it sustainable (well, literally), you can support us by buying a print, recommend it to a friend, say some good words to us (“bravi!”, for example) by filling the contact form, drop us an email, or simply:
