Roberto De Mitri
Italy

1st Place - Outstanding Achievement

"De silence of sand."

This photo was taken in Jurmala, Gulf of Riga, in the month of September 2013. This beach faces the cold Baltic Sea. Although this place, very charming, doesn’t hold a particular sentimental value to me, this photo, the picture of the beach, is the reflection of my mood of that time. And the picture of that moment is the reflection of the cold crystallized in my eyes. Of the invisible yet ubiquitous Baltic wind, which glided into and beyond the horizon. The photo of the dominant and prevalent void, whatever is the name that it takes, whatever is the indefinable indeterminable feeling it swallows. This photo is the exact mirror of my vacuum lost in that istant. The exact face of a suspended, grey and dull portrait of the soul. This photo is the complete dispersion of the gaze, in the contemplation of a remote vastness, left open and bare by the drifting of the water of the sea, lost in the silent and blind depths of its abyss. There is nothing of calculated in this photo. There isn't any idea of a project, nor the predetermination of a message. There is no search for an explicit style. Neither rational view. There is only the senseless emotional contemplation of the cold and of the void of that moment. There is only one morning in late summer. And the salty uniformity of the Baltic Sea. Then there is a shoreline, smooth white bones left uncovered and unprotected, without tendons and nerves. A sea retreated back into its stupor. Torpor.