Faith Worn
The new photobook by Marcello Pitardi
Some photographs are made to tell the story of a moment. Others, as they travel through time, eventually come to tell something about the person who made them as well.
La fede addosso – Faith Worn grew out of analogue photographs taken by Marcello Pitardi between 1983 and 1987 during the celebrations of San Rocco in Gioiosa Ionica and Saints Cosmas and Damian in Riace, Calabria.
Nearly forty years later, these photographs return in a volume that sets out to be more than a record of two religious celebrations. The heart of the story lies elsewhere: in gestures, faces and moments of waiting; in the deep relationship between a community and what it recognises as part of its own identity.
Processions, drums, devotion, encounters, nights spent alongside people who, at first, were strangers. The sacred and the profane are not presented as opposing worlds, but as dimensions that continually touch and overlap in everyday life.
Photography thus becomes both testimony and memory.
Throughout the book, the images enter into dialogue with an autobiographical narrative in which the author returns to the places and encounters of those years. Not to reconstruct the past through nostalgia, but to ask what a photograph is capable of preserving when the people, the places, and even the person who pressed the shutter have changed.
At its heart lies a simple question: what remains of our passage through the world?
La fede addosso – Faith Worn seeks an answer by allowing the photographs — and the time held within them — to speak.
The volume is published as a bilingual Italian–English edition under the international title Faith Worn.
2026 Edition · 128 pages · ISBN 979-12-243-4226-7 · €28.00
The book is self-published and available on a print-on-demand basis through Pixel Photo Magazine, in a sewn-bound edition with a soft-touch cover.
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