Making Pictures

2022-ongoing

Making Pictures is a reader-supported publication exploring the intersection of photography and psychology. It examines how these fields converge within the practice of image-making, drawing on a broad range of disciplines—including culture, technology, the social sciences, and clinical practices.

It is a blog, a newsletter, and a collection of notes—an attempt to give shape to an emerging, transdisciplinary body of knowledge around photography with an intentionally fluid structure and informal tone.

As of January 2026, Making Pictures has published over 50 monthly essays, featuring hundreds of references spanning literature, philosophy, science, and poetry—alongside the history, criticism, and theory of photography.

Making Pictures is available only in Italian. For those wishing to explore, a good translator will help—though curiosity is required.

MAKING PICTURES

Jan 2026

Dec 2025
«Disciplines in science are artifacts; they are artificial. They are often necessary, but not always a satisfactory limitation on the number of observations and the number of facts that one takes into account. There are no boundaries in nature that correspond one to one with the boundaries of disciplines. For example life is not necessarily limited to biology, it’s also obviously evident in sociology and psychology. It also appears in the cosmos».

Ervin László and Antonio Marturano, A Theory of Everything

Nov 2025

Oct 2025

Andrej Tarkovskij, Solaris, (1972)

Sep 2025

Aug 2025
«[...] whoever uses such a machine will have a mind like a machine, and that whoever views the world with such a mind will lose oneness with the world».

Victor Burgin, Returning to Benjamin

Jul 2025
«The context of Arago’s speech enables one to reconstruct the regime of rights and privileges that were involved in the advocacy of photography. That the world and others’ worlds are made to be exhibited is not a question for Arago, nor is it a question for everybody but rather for a certain audience addressed in his speech with a familiarizing “you”, an audience made up of white men like him, French statesmen and scientists. The acquisition of rights to dissect and study people’s worlds [...] and render their fragments into pieces to be meticulously copied with sharpness and exactitude is not posed as a problem but is taken for granted».

Ariella Azoulay, Unlearning the Origins of Photography

Jun 2025

Ermanno Olmi, Il segreto del bosco vecchio, (1993)

May 2025

Stanley Kubrik, Shining, (1980)

Apr 2025
«Sono perplesso - però sento tuttora il continuo bisogno di trattenere le cose, e quindi mi chiedo spesse volte se la forma del notes - non del diario, ma del notes che, al di là del soggettivo, riporti solo riflessioni, osservazioni, sogni degni d'essere ricordati - se il notes dicevo non sia un equivalente epico migliore che non un racconto che abbia preso forma solo grazie a lotte, attese, pazienza e anche rassegnazione. Me lo sto proprio chiedendo. Sa, il mio ideale sarebbe di riunire entrambi. Far sì che si congiungano l'epico, così ben collegato, e il disparato, il saltuario, il momentaneo, e le notazioni, in modo che tutti formino un'unità complementare organica, affinché si trovino il grande epos e le piccole cose d'ogni giorno, che spesso...spesso mi commuovono [...] senza dover rafforzare niente e senza che mi debba proporre di fare questo e quest'altro; invece penso: sarà questo l'anno in cui non mi pongo alcun tema, ma lascerò invece che il mondo prenda il suo corso. [...] Se questo riesce a decollare, se due cose si incontrano e si congiungono anche linguisticamente, allora nasce la poesia».

Peter Handke, Intervista sulla scrittura

Mar 2025

Feb 2025
«Però l’ambizione di partire con l’idea di volersi esprimere è praticamente un alibi che ci costruiamo per non fare tutta l'altra fatica. Noi ci esprimiamo sempre, ci esprimiamo bene o malamente; ognuno di noi è una persona che si esprime in un certo modo e dopo poche battute... io mi trovo incasellato in un certo tipo di espressione...Se capovolgete il problema e fate conto che l'espressione non sia qualcosa che amplia, ma che limita, capite che il nostro problema non è di esprimerci, ma è di prendere coscienza del mondo e delle cose e l'esprimerci è una cosa che, va beh, ci capita addosso».

Luciano Fabro, Lezioni 1983-1995

Jan 2025
«And creatures poop. A lot. However, the parts that are not feces will take form, and this is the result of practice. Going long requires pause and reflection. Going long also requires forgiveness».

Ian Lynam, The Impossibility of Silence: Writing for Designers, Artists & Photographers

Dec 2024

Nov 2024

Oct 2024

Sep 2024
«It is a black box. It is precisely the obscurity of the box which motivates photographers to take photographs. They lose themselves, it is true, inside the camera in search of possibilities, but they can nevertheless control the box. For they know how to feed the camera (they know the input of the box), and likewise they know how to get it to spit out photographs (they know the output of the box). Therefore the camera does what the photographer wants it to do, even though the photographer does not know what is going on inside the camera. This is precisely what is characteristic of the functioning of apparatuses: The functionary controls the apparatus thanks to the control of its exterior (the input and output) and is controlled by it thanks to the impenetrability of its interior. To put it another way: functionaries control a game over which they have no competence. The world of Kafka, in fact».

Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Aug 2024

Jul 2024

Jun 2024
«For with respect to art that despotic logician occasionally had the feeling of a gap, a void, half a reproach, possibly a neglected duty. As he tells his friends in prison, there often came to him one and the same dream apparition, which always said the same thing to him: “Socrates, practice music”».

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

May 2024

Apr 2024

Mar 2024
«“I can’t imagine what you’re going through”. She would respond, “Yes, you can imagine it. You just don’t want to”».

Ariella Azoulay in Sarah Sentilles, How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering

Feb 2024

BBC One, The A Word, (2016-2020)

Jan 2024

Dec 2023

Nov 2023

Oct 2023
«Embarrassment is important. If you’re not willing to humiliate yourself, make mistakes and downright fuck-up, you should consider working in a cubicle farm. It’s safer there. Because as a creative, you’ll be called an idiot at least once a day.
Making mistakes and risking embarrassment, even failure, is how you progress. Without it, you’ll be stuck in the same old safe zone: not embarrassed, but not better either. So if we want to do this thing we love, make stuff, we have to get over our need not to look stupid».

KesselsKramer, The Embarassment Show

Sep 2023
«The artist invokes the power of play to investigate how we understand race, gender, and other constructs that inspire social and economic exclusion. These forms of exclusion are sometimes obvious and overt, but mostly they simmer beneath the surface. This makes them hard to identify, and even harder to oppose. De Andrade is concerned with how small gestures and everyday human interactions reveal larger patterns in society».

Foam, The Power of Play within the work of Jonathas de Andrade

Aug 2023

Jul 2023
«Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me».

Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

Jun 2023

May 2023

Apr 2023

Mar 2023
«Which is to say that what might suffice is not given, it is not a fact lying around for us to discover. This is why we are metaphysicians in the dark. The only light with which we might view objects has to be kindled by us, by our activity. So, the darkness here is not at all frightening, it is rather that if we are in the dark, then it is a question for us of finding what will suffice, what Stevens calls “the finding of a satisfaction”».

Simon Critchley, Things Merely are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Feb 2023
«Rules of art can be useful, but they do not determine the practice of an art; they are maxims, which can serve as a guide to an art only if they can be integrated into the practical knowledge of the art. They cannot replace this knowledge».

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards A Post-Critical Philosophy

Jan 2023

Jack Cocker, Reiner Holzemer, The Colourful Mr Eggleston, 2009

Dec 2022

Nov 2022

Oct 2022
«Along with many others at the dawn of photography, Diamond believed in the apparent objectivity and realism of the faithful photographic record, “free altogether from the painful caricaturing which so disfigures almost all the published portraits of the Insane as to render them nearly valueless for purposes of art or of science”. However, Diamond’s photographic images were not objective depictions of mental illness but rather reflections of the predominant cultural understanding and iconography of the Victorian era».

Cambridge University Press, Hugh Diamond, the father of psychiatric photography – psychiatry in pictures

Sep 2022

Aug 2022
«The term ignorance gets its harshness from its negative value, particularly in historic Western culture. There is no doubt that the Classical strain of Western culture embraced the idea that knowledge is good and ignorance is a defect that requires remedy. Socrates and Plato took the extreme view that every vice and all societal evil ultimately derive from ignorance».

Daniel R. DeNicola, Understanding Ignorance. The surprising impact of what we don’t know

Jul 2022

Jun 2022
«Imagination is a place where it rains».

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

May 2022

Richard Ennis, human skull with scenes representing mental activities, 1991.

Apr 2022
«Cultivation analysis asks, in other words, to what extent television “cultivates” our understanding of the world.
[…] One of the basic premises of Gerbner’s cultivation analysis is that television violence is not simple acts but rather “a complex social scenario of power and victimization”. What matters is not so much the raw fact that a violent act is committed but who does what to whom. Gerbner is as insistent about this as he is about anything, repeating it in all his writings and speeches. “What is the message of violence?” he asks me rhetorically over tea in his office at the University of Pennsylvania, a cozy, windowless rectangle filled with books, pictures, and objets d'art. “Who can get away with what against whom?”».

Scott Stossel, The Man Who Counts the Killings

Mar 2022
«What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it».

Herbert Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World

Feb 2022

Jan 2022