Anyone who takes up photography in my Apulia has always had to reckon with the olive trees of our land, a godsend, from a photographic point of view as well… Naturally, precisely because they have been visited by countless cameras, it is not easy to find an approach that is, I won’t say original, but simply different… I tried my hand at them too, though without making many attempts; after all, there is nothing I have photographed as much as I should have… At the end of 2016 I made this work, managing to isolate these subjects thanks to the darkness and to the way artificial light drops off drastically after a few metres, leaving in complete darkness everything just a little further from the light source… This series, presented at the MIA Photo Fair in Milan in 2018, was originally called ‘the trees of memory’, but I wanted to change it. Looking at them again, the word ghost kept coming to mind… then by chance I came across (in a novel by Philip Roth, ‘The Human Stain’) the term ‘spook’, an ambiguous word that means SPECTRE but which in American English is also a derogatory term for Black people, and therefore sadly topical. The possibility of misunderstanding this word is at the heart of the great American writer’s story. In the end I chose this term rather than another possible synonym because spectre, etymologically, comes from speculum, mirror. Isn’t ‘the mirror with a memory’ a definition of photography? But why do these trees, in my photographs, make me think of spectres? First of all for a technical, visual reason, because of the way these photos were made. Others, of course, have tried their hand at portraying, so to speak, our majestic olive trees in the dark. Some have used the light painting technique, which consists of keeping the camera shutter open for several minutes while brushing the subject with the beam of a continuous light, producing a painterly effect, as the name suggests. Others have lit these subjects with several light sources, an enveloping light, obtaining illumination with softened shadows. I make these photographs by combining in post-production several shots taken with a single light source, but directed from different positions each time, producing very pronounced shadows falling in different directions. A situation that cannot be observed live, in reality… and the brain perceives this situation, unusual for our eyes, giving, to me at least, a ghostly sensation. But of course it is not just a technical matter. In my imagination these trees are spectral for other reasons. It would be too easy to talk about Xylella fastidiosa: not enough is known about it yet, at least not by me, but undoubtedly, fake or science, there is a real fear that these trees of ours may be ghosts that we can still see but that are already condemned to death, like stars whose light reaches us from space but which may already have imploded while we admire them… And these thousand-year-old warriors become an excellent paraphrase of our times, in which nothing is certain any more, everything wavers, everything is called into question, even those certainties that, like these giants, have seen it all over the centuries and now seem less steady, less firmly rooted in the soil… In part they also represent my own uncertainty, in a difficult phase of identity confusion and of passing into a new age, the last one, a very delicate one, in which I have the impression of going around and communicating with others while having already imploded myself… a presence in my own absence… as is said of photographs. It is sad, after growing up in one of the best periods, at least for Europe, the second half of the last century, when hope and future were not empty words, to grow old now in a liquid society, and without even knowing how to swim…