“In powerful street photographs, an instant of life that otherwise goes unnoticed becomes magic—perfect, forever frozen,” says Italian photographer and visual artist Simona Bonnano.
Bonanno describes her visual language as eclectic, and says that her approach to making images is two-fold, depending on the subject matter. At times, she will work with almost scientific precision, intensively researching and studying. In those instances the resulting photographic gesture is only one phase in the overall process. At other times, however, she works with more passion and less planning, opting instead to move with the action and respond to what’s happening around her. That’s how most of her street photographs are made, she explains, including her image Horse & Canadair.
In the photograph, an airplane rumbles across the sky above a soccer field, with something that looks like smoke pouring from its engine. It feels huge, and incredibly close. The sky is dark, almost apocalyptically so, and a white horse adds a shock of lightness to the foreground. Somewhere in the background, the shadow of another horse—black this time—lingers.
Explaining the circumstances that led to the photo, Bonanno says, “in July 2017, 131 fires broke out with intensity for days in the area of Messina, Sicily in Italy, devastating thousands of hectares of Mediterranean vegetation, cork woods, and maritime pines. During the night, between the 9th and 10th of July, the stables of the local Sports University Campus were evacuated due to this tremendous fire. Horses and dogs were brought to the soccer field and they spent the night there while we waited for the firefighters and the Canadair aircrafts, which were carrying water to douse the flames.” Bonanno was there with her camera and her own horse, watching the night unfold. Then, on the afternoon of the 10th of July the fires’ intensity increased and it became too dangerous to stay, and the whole campus was evacuated.
Horse & Canadair is one of many pictures Bonnano took during that time, all culminating in a larger project entitled 19 ore (or, 19 hours). “It’s actually the most representative image of the time I spent on reportage during these terrible events,” she says—the most powerful visual symbol of the 19 hours she lived through the event.
Looking back on the atmosphere in the moments before she took this image, she recalls how she had been waiting for the truck that would bring the horses away from the campus. She had put her camera away in her car, and was getting ready to manage her horse and help him to get inside the van. The air was hot and full of tension, when suddenly the flames became more violent and surged closer until they were right on top of the hill that overhung the soccer field.
“Then I saw this plane trying to fly vertically in an attempt to throw water exactly on that point, while also avoiding the people and facilities around it,” she describes. “I grabbed my camera and took a photograph, and then waited for it to loop back and return. When it did, I tried again from a lower position which gave the white horse a more majestic presence.” That’s the moment Horse & Canadair was taken—an image that exudes action and intensity, despite its stillness. “It’s a powerful photo rich in mystery,” she says thoughtfully, “and it asks viewers to question what’s happening, what the plane is doing, and why there is a horse on a playing field.”
In the reportage images she makes, Bonnano is forever searching for atmospheric natural and climate-related events she can give a lasting visual presence to through her camera, and her choice to work in black and white is because she sees it as necessary to distil the true essence of an image. “If colors are not fundamental elements of the pictures, then they just distract the observer,” she says. “In Horse and Canadair, the use of black and white amplifies the ambiguity. The Canadair without its recognizable colors seems like a war plane, and the water looks like dark smoke.” In other words, it’s an image that makes you stop and look again.
Editor’s note: Horse & Canadair was a Single Image Winner in the LensCulture Street Photography Awards 2022. For more exciting takes on street photography, check out the rest of the winners.
