Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

A Perfect Idiot

whi le going around and taking pictures of people. ● Łucas Ciepiela, impassive even when he was alone, looked at himmove away in haste, photographed him, stopped on the edge of the pavement whi le l ighting a cigarette, and then returned to his experiments. When Morel had come in, he’d almost finished, he was developing his last portraits in black and white, he only used black and white fi lm, it accentuated his vision of l ife, a simpl istic one, because it was already difficult to manage that one, and he was about to scan and put them on l ine. He couldn’t stay away from that damn computer for even an hour. Even if he deluded himself that he used them for pleasure—and publ ishing the photographs was one of these pleasures—he had to admit that his other activity, the one connected to the banks, kept him glued night and day to the two monitors he always had turned on. In a matter of seconds, you could lose or gain a fortune, that ’s what he told himself every time a pretty girl passed by and he wasn’t able to concentrate on the pure pleasure of looking at her. A few of his unframed photographs, hung on the edges of the enormous bookcase, depicted him in a l ittle mirror on shelves with antique objects. Ciepiela had sought that portrait to have a place, a l ittle one, among his objects. No one would have noticed without approaching and studying it closely, it was

149