Federicaville

I am sitting alone in my Brooklyn apartment on the 29th floor when outside everything is finally quieting down.
The air is crisp and the smell of rain is entering the room through the little crack I left open in the living room window.
I am excited. I am so excited I can barely breath. In one week time I will be on a flight to Tel Aviv, Israel. I have dreamt this moment for the past 10 years, and it’s finally materializing under my eyes. I am leaving. I am going and I am doing it all with money I have earned, raised, won. No string attached. I am leaving with a one-way ticket and like a seagull I may not be expected back.

I am excited. I am excited, but also scared too. Terribly scared. Scared of not knowing how to speak hebrew almost at all and not to even mention having to change my money in a currency I have not used since 1996. I am baffled to the fact that I am going to turn 29 on the 29 of June alone maybe in the Negev desert possibly with my camera at hands contemplating life in a kibbutz.
I am going. Alone. To Israel.
What more is there to say for a wondering Jew who has wonder the world for years from Italy to Colorado, to D.C. to Louisiana, to New York who finally decides *(about time!) to go do a story of photos in the land of her ancestors?

I am alive. I feel so alive inside. I am alive and well. I feel as if everything cannot but end up being ok no matter how little do I know about anything or anybody who lives in Israel. It doesn’t matter. I will have my cameras and my feet to take me anywhere I wish to go and I will live an unforgettable experience because I have no expectations and no knowledge of what will be good and what will be bad.

I am going to ISRAEL in one week and I feel FREE. I have butterfly in my belly and it’s not because I am in love *(well, hopefully by the time I get there I will have met a handful of incredibly attractive Israeli men and love will be all around me, but this is another story for another blog post!) because I am finally keeping a promise to myself of going, alone in a place that scares me to do something that scares me even more.

I am loving the jitterbugs I am having just thinking about being alone in front of the Wailing Wall at sunset right before Shabbat begins with my camera in one hand and a Hebrew sentence book in the other.

This is how life surprises you daily.

It would not have been possible without the support of my whole family **(even, and most of all, Nonno Vittorio who just recently past and whose 88 birthday would have been today, MAY 15 and I know he is looking from above in the clear, blue sky with a proud smile on his face) who have always said YES when everyone else would have said now, who have listen to hours of conversation over orthodox Jewish everything and who have come with me to meet some of the women I have photographed and interviewed and are now waiting for me to finish this project so they can stop receiving calls about “wedding proposal” from the Crown Hights HOT LINE.

But, most of all, I have to say thank you to ONE person: Israeli author Chaim Potock and his book “the Chosen One,” without which I would not have been “so obsessed” with wanting to depict everything there is to know about the orthodox jewish community anywhere in the world. His books where my own “bible” growing up and I am going to Israel in one week because I read them all several times and I never stop dreaming one day to be the one “insider” reporting live from within these community.

I am going to Israel in one week and I am going to fulfill just that.
Wish me luck, but do not wish it too loud, because I may never come back!
Sayonara:)

Just to steam some heat off, today I woke up and walked from bay ridge to coney island. I had a big scare this week thinking I may have torn my ACL once again after a bad fall bouldering, but thankfully the doctor today told me it was all ok…yet he did say I needed to start taking it slower or I was going to injure it again. Oh man, but it has been a year and half, how long will it take to heal my wonderful knee? So, I had to do something *(and I could not run or climb or do yoga)…So, what better reason to walk 6 miles to then sit with my feet in the sand listening to the sound of the ocean’s waves crushing on the shore in one of my favorite spot on Earth?
Yes, Coney, oh, Coney, how sweet is thy sound of orthodox kids running around in and out of the water chasing waves, how daring is the smell of french fries to me and how inviting is the taste of ‘different’ parading your board walk?
Yes, this place is the BEST theraphy for “upset anything, anytime.”
Thank God for the hot dog contest, the wheel of fortune, the polar bears and the never-ending tourists. God bless Coney Island and its silent fishermen sitting hopeful on the long, long pier.

“…I realized that I missed an identity- a sense of who I was beyond that which I had found, beyond just what was going on inside of me. I realized I could do no good in this world until I knew more about who I was, what good really meant, and where I belonged in this world,” Rachel’s Daughter: Newly Orthodox Jewish women.

The 99% missed work and came back down on the City street on May 1. Among the many, there were the “underpaid” immigrants platooning in front-of Cipotle and The Capital Grill where their pay checks seems to have been disappearing. There, there were the “international” students who demand a better education system where money is actually spent for extra classes and better professors… not much on the health insurance unfortunately, I would have loved to have seen more people demonstrating on this issue. I even met the May Day fairy who got dressed up in a tu-tu just to have all policemen *(and myself) looking at her with some odd eyes until she mentioned who she really was.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is back for sure, but its stamina is not all back yet. Or, at least, not at its peak as it was that day back in October when we marched from Wall Street, all the way to Times Square where even policemen on horses were not strong enough to break “the enemy lines,” ( I was literally standing on a wooden structure that was trembling beneath my feet at the push of the horses, but it never felt, they never made it through).

Tuesday reminded me a bit of when I was in High School back in Italy and I was trying to cut school to voice my opinion on anything worth demanding just because I did not want to be called up and had to recite the whole Odyssey by heart in front of the whole class. I too want a better world where health insurance is cheaper for freelancers, where we have better chances of finding jobs and where money is not held only by the rich and richest. A world where wanting to have a child should not mean constant stress because everything is too expensive and the environment has been polluted so much that we may want to think twice before bringing one more living being on this Earth. I do believe in “peacefully manifesting my ideals,” yet again I must say, those HAVE TO BE followed by stronger actions from the people. We are not in ’68 anymore, and bad abits are much more difficult to break. If we want change, we must fight harder. This WAR may start on the street, but let’s bring it over to the organs of government and let’s propose plans to “reform” dear our world so that we cannot be told NO. What do you say? This would really be what “democracy looks like,” not just pacing the city streets with signs. Sings are only effective for a very short period, then they are long forgotten, we must drill our ideals in people’s heads with canny ideas ourselves.
I support the cause and I will be there to report change as much as I will be there to remind myself that, thank G-d, we live in a country where we have freedom of speak and expression and that our voices shall become an echo of the ones of those who cannot speak for fear of death.

For the nine years I have been rock climbing, I have always had a love-hate relationship with this savage sport.
Climbing rocks has always been a very deep act of surrendering to my own self-confidence and some days this had been easier than others.
I do not climb because it is fun, I climb because it is challenging. Because it pushes me past my limits.
When you are leading a route where the chances of you making it up or falling down are pretty much equal, but there is something called a “survival mode” that turns on inside of you that makes you do things you may never thought yourself capable of.
This same “survival mode” one has on a rock can often been transplanted on the ground when we think we have lost self-control or we feel lost and not sure of what to do next.
Climbing rocks is a very useful school of life. A much more dangerous one, but also a very satisfying type.

There is something very pure and real about wanting to reach for one’s limit by challenging nature. The feeling of success or defeat one feels when getting up a rock is not as easy as we had envisioned, it’s a very spiritual act as if we were not only pushing our human boundaries, but also accepting our limitations in life with a strange respect and self-control.

Yes, climbing is scary. Being 200 feet above the ground and being held only by a rope, knowing there is not way down, but repelling is not joke!
But the view of falcons flying by and the incredible silence and peace one experiences up there, as if she was the Queen of the World beneath her, that is worth every sweat spots and difficult moves. Not to mention how good it feels when the sun is beating on your shoulders and the wind is just encouraging your ascent with little sudden pushes here and there.

And I thought I was never going to do this again when three years ago on a lovely memorial day weekend at the Red River Gorge I took a very bad fall at the top anchors and got so scared for my life that I stopped climbing all at once.

Well, the fear is overcome and the love for the rock is back where it used to be. Bring it on, Gunks, I am yours to try!

When I was 13 I read “The Chosen One,” from Chaim Potok. The two friends Danny and Raven were an Orthodox Jew and a non-observant Jew son of a Zionist journalist who grew-up to be best friends on Bedford Avenue. This book shaped my Jewish identity as a teenager growing up in Italy. Since then, I made a promise to myself: One day I was going to come to America to learn about those “Chassidim” I read about in Potok’s books.
In 2010, I moved to Brooklyn, turn my Pre Med degree into a photographer career and began “Daughters Of The King,” a photographic essay on the Orthodox Jewish women of Crown Heights. What started as a “street photography,” soon became a deeper analysis of my own spirituality through the eyes of these religious women. From the streets, I was led into their homes to dine with their families, attend their weddings and photograph barmitzvahs across the country. The reason why I want to come to the Barn and spend sleepless nights speaking and breathing photography with photo colleagues and a fantastic cast of photo editors, is to learn how I can further develop this story of mine and make it into my very first book and exhibit. I am ready for some “hard core” critique. I am prepared to learn how a photojournalistic story could serve society on a deeper level as a social justice tool since I aspire to photograph minorities so that the world could modify their fate.
I am not a photojournalist for art’s sake, I am a photojournalist because from my years as a print journalist I understood that images can change somebody’s opinion and move a person to tears to make the adequate changes that will make a difference between life and death.

I was once like you are now
and I know it’s not easy
to be calm, when you found, something going on
take your time, think a lot
think of everything you’ve got
for you may still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not

[...]

All the times, that I’ve cried
Keeping all the things I knew inside
And it’s hard
But it’s harder to ignore it

If they were right–I’d agree
But it’s them–they know
Not me That I have to go away

-Cat Stevens, “Father and Son”

…How about trowing a strawberry in a martini glass full of water and time it just right?!

I asked him to take his shirt off and he said “sure!”
There was nothing else I needed to do, but shoot after that. And so I did.
And here is Carter shirtless in his full-on edge-lighting suit.

One evening an old Cherokee Indian told his grandson about a battle
that goes on inside people.
He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.”
One is Evil:
It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.
The other is Good:
It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather:
“Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied:
“The one you feed.”

How true… I honestly do feel like a battle field inside sometimes.
We are all good and bad, sad and happy, grass and soft-spoken, but something inside us makes us more one or the other depending on the time of the day, the occasion and the amount of stress we may be battling with.
There are many insignificant rules and regulations in this world that we feel we MUST obey to for fear of a ticket or prison, or simply for fear of judgment, but really the ONLY, very important rules are the ones we make ourselves respect for our own self-growth and self-realization. We create these rules, we modify them, we manipulate them when we should not, we also become too strict in respecting them sometimes, but in the end they are there to helps us out refraining from wearing a mask to cover-up our flaws, defects, mistakes, which only annihilates our true self making the “evil wolf” come out to hunt us with a whole lot of self-judgment.