Yegane: Galleria

Curly hair against carved stone. Sunglasses on, sunglasses off. Six frames around the Duomo and the Galleria on a bright afternoon. We started outside the cathedral — hard winter sun cutting across the facade, tourists everywhere. Yegane didn't care about any of it. She found a carved alcove and turned into profile, and the light wrapped around her curls in a way I couldn't have planned. No sunglasses yet, just this quiet moment before the rest of the set kicked in. Then the sunglasses came out and the energy shifted completely. She has this thing where she adjusts them with both hands, chin up, like she's daring the camera. We shot that in front of the bronze doors with the crowd streaming past behind her — it works because she's completely still while everything else moves. The best frames came inside the Galleria. That glass ceiling throws this incredible diffused light down through the arcade, and when she smiled up into it with the coat thrown over her shoulders, the whole frame opened up. Low angle, glass vault overhead, her grinning into the light — that's the one. The set moves between two registers: the quiet profile shots where she's almost private, and the sunglasses-on frames where she's fully performing. Both feel natural, which is the whole point. She reads differently against shadowed columns than against sunlit stone, and I wanted both versions in the same series. Six frames from a winter walk through Milan's most photographed square — but these aren't about the architecture.