In this photograph from Enzo Ragazzini’s Waiting for Godot series, a woman walks briskly past the rear of a Roman city bus. On its back, an advertisement for a film festival features a serene female face, eyes softly cast to the side, emerging through an artificial tear in a blank white field. The living woman moves, absorbed in her thoughts, while the printed figure remains fixed, preserved in commercial stillness. Their near-overlap invites a strange sense of intimacy.
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In this photograph from Enzo Ragazzini’s Waiting for Godot series, a woman walks briskly past the rear of a Roman city bus. On its back, an advertisement for a film festival features a serene female face, eyes softly cast to the side, emerging through an artificial tear in a blank white field. The living woman moves, absorbed in her thoughts, while the printed figure remains fixed, preserved in commercial stillness. Their near-overlap invites a strange sense of intimacy.
This juxtaposition underscores Ragazzini’s ongoing exploration of the real and the represented, a recurring motif throughout the series. The walker is unaware of the advertisement, yet in the photograph, their worlds intersect. The gaze of the printed woman appears directed at the passerby, collapsing the divide between subject and symbol. The contrast between the walking figure and the enormous face on the bus emphasizes a broader tension: between movement and stillness, presence and projection. It’s a portrait of isolation framed within the mechanisms of public life.
Ragazzini’s digital reworking of the photograph extracts fine black lines, giving the surface a tactile finish that recalls the textures of Expressionist prints. Through precise framing and transformation of the visual field, he gives this ephemeral encounter the depth and weight of a carefully composed tableau.
In Waiting for Godot, 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.
