A sense of cinematic drama permeates this photograph from Enzo Ragazzini’s Waiting for Godot series. A reclining image of Lady Gaga from her Fame perfume campaign dominates the bottom half of the bus, her stylized body adorned with crawling miniature men. Above, inside the real vehicle, a young woman gazes through the window with a quiet, ambiguous expression. Caught mid-thought, her presence has the gravity of a portrait. The artificial and the authentic converge, collapsing boundaries between the world of advertising and the interior lives of commuters.
...more
A sense of cinematic drama permeates this photograph from Enzo Ragazzini’s Waiting for Godot series. A reclining image of Lady Gaga from her Fame perfume campaign dominates the bottom half of the bus, her stylized body adorned with crawling miniature men. Above, inside the real vehicle, a young woman gazes through the window with a quiet, ambiguous expression. Caught mid-thought, her presence has the gravity of a portrait. The artificial and the authentic converge, collapsing boundaries between the world of advertising and the interior lives of commuters.
The visual juxtaposition is both jarring and poetic. Gaga’s iconic pose, half goddess, half surrealist sculpture, meets the weary contemplation of daily transit. The young woman becomes not a consumer but a counter-figure, her face echoing the poised allure below, though emptied of seduction. The advertisement dazzles with polish; the rider sits in quiet introspection.
Ragazzini’s painterly transformation dissolves the photographic surface into etched lines and sculptural tones, recalling the tactile energy of Expressionist ink drawings. Light and shadow play across both figures, emphasizing their strange alignment. This confrontation between spectacle and stillness is not staged but perceived, discovered through the artist’s intuition. The result is a composition of suspended meaning, at once spontaneous and deliberate, rooted in the absurd choreography of everyday life.
In the Waiting for Godot series, Enzo Ragazzini reveals the quiet dramas of urban life, where public spaces become stages of fatigue, isolation, and longing. Turning his lens on people waiting in Rome, he captures the collision between real bodies and glossy fantasies; moments where individuals remain disconnected beneath advertisements promising beauty, success, and a life just out of reach.
less...
