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Michela Romanelli
@the_backdoortraveller
Landscape photographer based in Italy
I remember starting to experience photography in middle school, when I got these disposable cameras from the 90s to take photos of my first school trips. In particular, I remember a trip to Paris, France. I was so excited! I grew up in a modest family, traveling for me was a new and intriguing thing so I wanted to somehow capture every moment of that adventure. Up to today I have kept in my drawer those photographs taken with so much love and curiosity. Even after that, I continued to experience this strong interest because my mother had an old film SLR from when she was young. Never will I forget the enthusiasm I felt when finally picking up the developed photographs, and the frustration when seeing the totally burnt shots. I admit that looking at these photographs now, I feel happiness.
"At that time I was just a little girl and they remind me of how I started. But above all, they remind me that I had abandoned this passion for some time."
"Sometimes in life it happens - not everyone at an early age has the understanding that their passions should never be abandoned and the determination to continue."
You are young and in a very delicate phase of growth; what surrounds us is fundamental for our choices. Family, school and friendships, all this influences us strongly and sometimes we are led to make ‘wrong’ choices. Nevertheless, it’s amazing how much these choices sometimes prove right in the end because they bring you back to what belongs to you and has always belonged to you, to what excites you and makes you feel alive. All this may seem trivial but in reality I understood how fundamental it is to never ignore our inner child, to keep our creativity alive at twenty, thirty, forty years and forever.
"I had the great fortune to meet a special person, the boy who is my life partner today."
He encouraged and supported me in taking up this passion again. An unexpected birthday present from him, a first optical digital SLR, got me back on track. Together we started traveling by motorbike to discover countries that seemed unattainable to us such as Turkey and Morocco. With me I always had the camera despite the inconvenience of carrying a bulky luggage. Hence the passion for adventure and travel photography – shooting in these fascinating places with mysterious cultures and breathtaking landscapes was really special.
"We shared lots of experiences in a variety of places, the Western Balkans, Iceland, Mexico, South America and India being the most important to me."
"A beautiful adventure that changed me profoundly was the travel in South America, visiting Peru, Chile and Bolivia."
It made me really understand what I was looking for in my travels and in my photographs. We found ourselves traveling in extreme conditions never encountered before, so much that I was just one step away from giving up and ceasing the journey. We were in the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve in Bolivia, discovering its lagoons on a plateau of impressive size, where getting lost without a navigator and radio signal was very likely. There are no roads up there but only sand tracks for hundreds of kilometers at over 4000 meters above sea level.
I looked around, we were alone surrounded by a wild and boundless nature, and the color of the lagoon went from red to orange, to pink, and yellow. Lots of flamingos danced above its waters, while a group of elegant vicuñas watched us from afar and I saw numerous volcanoes in the background. The fear was completely gone, making room for an emotion so overwhelming that I was moved. Now I knew that all those sacrifices had been necessary, to be able to get there and to earn that beauty. Now the taste of the sand on the lips had become pleasant, because it was the taste of victory: I had defeated my anxieties and my deepest fears…
"I had managed to overcome my limits. I took a photograph to capture that moment and I knew it would become unforgettable."
Even today, that shot remains the one I am most attached to, because it represents an important moment in my life. This incredible experience made me realize that in reality what I was looking for went far beyond a simple adventure. It was something much deeper; I was looking for strong emotions, for unforgettable moments that I could keep in my heart and being able to tell my children one day. But above all, I was looking for myself. I wanted to test myself, to really understand where I could go and what I could achieve.
"The trip to Ladakh, India was another beautiful challenge that brought me a lot and particularly contributed to my personal growth."
Exploring this country by motorcycle was truly fascinating because it is a land that still boasts authentic beauty, fortunately still little known by tourists. A great satisfaction was that of having reached the highest vehicle pass in the world (Khardung-la) at 5602 meters, the place that represents the “roof of the world”, a place where you can breathe a magical atmosphere. What struck me most was traveling for hundreds of kilometers surrounded only by unspoiled nature; the imposing mountains, the lakes that shone with a dazzling sky, the Tibetan flags that danced in the wind and the wild horses that galloped in freedom. At that moment it seemed to me that all this belonged only to me and it was an incredible feeling. Of course, all of this has a price; the days were so intense that it put us to the test. The roads climbed steeply up the mountain, the curves were so narrow that they did not allow for safety visibility and all this with really impressive precipices right at our side. The state roads indicated by the navigator often turned out to be very rough roads, sometimes even interrupted by rushing waterways to wade.
"The fear of damaging the motorcycle and getting stuck at 4000 meters above sea level in the middle of nowhere was real. Wind, rain and cold have often been our adventure companions, taking us to the limit of our strength."
"I realize that traveling in a country like this and especially on two wheels requires a great spirit of adaptation, since advanced tourist reception in the most remote towns is almost non-existent."
You have to rely on the kindness of some inhabitants; those who are ready to host you in their home can offer at most a cot on the ground, with an external and shared bathroom without hot water. All this may seem like suffering rather than pleasure, but in reality I learned that all these sacrifices make the experience unforgettable. During our trip, stopping in a small town, we were lucky enough to be hosted in the home of a local family, who welcomed us with generosity and cooked a hot meal. I felt so fortunate to have been able to connect with them and get to know a little more about their lifestyle. They are so humble and genuine, and smile at life despite the many difficulties they face every day. One of the best moments of this trip was when after a full day of hard route, we arrived on the shores of Lake Pangong at an altitude of 4250 meters. The sun was setting, the mountains emanated colors I had never seen before and the waters of the lake sparkled with an incredible deep blue.
"We waited for the moon to rise and contemplated the starry sky which at those altitudes without light pollution is truly magical."
Upon returning from our trip I felt the need to write a story about this beautiful adventure, I proposed my article together with my shots to a motorcycle magazine, “Enduro Action” with which I had already collaborated in the past for my trip in South America. I tried not to think too much about format and I let emotions speak because they are the ones that have always guided me in the right direction.I received the great feedback that my work had been approved a second time; being able to share and transmit the great emotions I had experienced through my shots and my article in the magazine was an enormous satisfaction.
"For me, shooting a beautiful landscape does not simply represent being able to capture it in the best way, but rather freezing the special moment and making it immortal."
"What makes the photos of these landscapes and places so wonderful in my eyes is the story behind it."
The years spent dreaming and planning that journey, hours of investigating to arrive prepared and safely, the emotion of the departure and finally the commitment and determination to get to these unreachable places. I can experience these sensations once again at home in the editing phase, which for me is a bit like drawing. It means giving a soul to that moment and being able to give life to all those emotions experienced. I always try to stay true to the original shot because I don’t like to change reality. Technology has evolved a lot and I understand the temptation to get carried away in post-production software, but I believe that nature is so wonderful that it does not need heavy adjustments. Nature itself offers us the ideal situations to shoot and we photographers have to know how to use them and capture them so it does justice to the beauty.
"There is a lot enclosed in the process of creating one shot, and giving the final photo a title is the step for me that completes the process."
"Back home from this latest adventure, I understood even more how strong the need to cultivate this passion is within me."
I also realized that the moments that brought me closer to photography were the painful experiences. I had big emotional losses and I suffered a lot, because the thing that makes us happiest in life is the same that can sometimes break us down. We all have something to hold on to in those moments, something that manages to make us feel good despite everything: Our passions. And when we find it within us and it becomes part of our essence, it then becomes something very powerful.Each of us is destined to live moments of suffering; it does not depend on us and in many cases we cannot control what happens to us. But there is something that we can influence: How we choose to go through that pain and the meaning we decide to attribute to those moments. For me, the only solution was to be able to glimpse the positive side and express it through my photography, my passion.
"I have learned many things from those negative experiences and somehow they have changed me forever. Within a loss there is always a conquest."
"I realized that I am increasingly strongly attracted to the remote places of this planet, to distant cultures and otherworldly landscapes."
All that is totally different and far from my reality intrigues me, because it the confrontation with what is unknown to us that we always learn new things, especially about ourselves. Until recently, the feeling of not knowing who I was and not knowing which future was better for me frightened me. Today, however, I realized that perhaps what I hope most of all is to never be able to find myself completely. Because continuing to search is what actually makes us feel alive, it represents the tendency of change and opportunities that life sometimes unexpectedly reserves for us. Someone wrote: “If you’re not in love with the battle but just with the victory you’re missing the whole point. The battle you fight defines who you are, the fight is the joy itself “. My weaknesses and my fears, the ones I thought would stop me, unexpectedly turned out to be my fuel. They themselves took me to where I never thought I would go.
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