Albero, Catania is a quietly haunting image from Pietro Motisi’s series Sicilia Fantasma, which explores the tension between landscape and memory across Sicily’s layered terrain. Captured with a Mamiya 7 medium format camera on Kodak Portra 400 film, the photograph features a lone, wind-bent tree standing improbably at the edge of the sea—part rooted, part adrift.
In the distance, a ferry cuts across the horizon and a fluorescent life vest floats in shallow waves, introducing industrial and human traces into an otherwise near-mythical scene. The work is filled with ghostly contrasts: permanence and transience, the natural and the artificial, presence and abandonment.
Motisi’s palette is soft yet precise, and his composition intentionally spare, inviting viewers to contemplate what remains—physically and metaphorically—when places lose their function but not their aura. Albero, Catania is not just a photograph of a tree by the shore; it is a portrait of Sicily’s spectral dualities.