Andrea Fanchin’s relationship with photography began in 1979, when his father bought an Olympus OM-1. Fanchin was nine years old and immediately wanted to use it. His father’s answer was practical: if he really wanted to photograph, he could begin with the family’s older Agfa Clack from 1954.
Decades later, the circle has closed. The Olympus OM-1 his father bought that summer is now the camera Fanchin carries most often, while the Agfa Clack still returns to his hands from time to time. What began as a child wanting access to an adult’s camera slowly became an archive of an entire period of life.
An archive before he knew it was one
By adolescence, Fanchin was carrying a compact camera to parties, holidays and concerts. At some point he realised that he had accumulated something more significant than a collection of snapshots: one of the most complete photographic records of his own groups of friends and their lives through the 1980s.
The importance of photography therefore arrived gradually. It was not one decisive artistic revelation, but the discovery that ordinary photographs had become historical documents simply because time had passed.
Close enough to be involved
Today Fanchin is drawn above all to ordinary people: distracted looks, private thoughts, gestures and forms of beauty that may not announce themselves immediately. He works close, usually with a 50mm lens, because distance would change the kind of photograph he wants to make.
That proximity also explains his scepticism toward easy labels such as “street photography.” What matters to him is less the category than the feeling that something authentic is happening nearby and that the camera is asking him to respond.
Slowing down again with medium format
Analogue photography already asks for patience, but medium format stretches that patience further. With cameras such as his Agfa Clack and Agfa Isola, exposure limits and a roll containing only eight to twelve photographs make every frame more deliberate.
The scene, light and stability of the camera have to align before the shutter is released. For Fanchin, that restriction is not frustrating. It is one of the things that makes the process meaningful.
Looking for cinema inside a still photograph
Fanchin moves freely between black-and-white, colour and ECN-2 films, choosing according to the work he wants to make and the light he expects to encounter. At night he is especially drawn to cinematic stocks, particularly tungsten-balanced film.
What he is looking for is not technical perfection. He wants a still photograph to carry something of cinema: atmosphere, colour, ambiguity and a sense that the frame belongs to a larger sequence we cannot see.
When the photograph becomes more important than the job
One experience became a particularly clear expression of how instinctive his photography can be. Fanchin had been hired to photograph a graduation party and arrived prepared with several films. During the evening he noticed a friend of the graduate who seemed completely natural in front of the camera.
He photographed her once, then again, then continued for much of the night. In the process, he effectively abandoned the assignment he had been hired to complete.
Professionally, it was not a sensible decision. For Fanchin, however, it clarified something fundamental: photography can pull him away from the planned task when a person or moment feels more urgent. The strongest impulse comes not from the brief, but from what he describes as the stomach and the heart.
Error is part of the process because it is part of us
Fanchin does not treat mistakes as exceptions that need to be removed from analogue practice. He makes them constantly, sometimes several times on the same roll. For him, that is not evidence of failure so much as evidence that photography is a human activity.
The unpredictability of film matters because it keeps the image from becoming completely closed before exposure. Surprise can arrive through chemistry, timing, light, focus or simply through the photographer changing direction midway through the work.
Photographing a factory that is disappearing
One of Fanchin’s current projects documents the decline of the historic Lanerossi factory in the town where he lives. Commissioned by the municipality, he is photographing the 57,000-square-metre industrial site with different cameras and films as the building continues to deteriorate.
The project is personal because he remembers the factory in the 1970s at full activity: the chimney smoking, looms audible from hundreds of metres away, shift sirens, workers in blue overalls entering and leaving. The photographs therefore sit between documentation and memory. He is recording a structure in the present while carrying an earlier version of it in his head.
Old glass plates and a new work about violence against women
A second project begins with nineteenth-century Lumière glass plates from Fanchin’s private collection. The images depict young mothers worn down by agricultural labour, childcare and the responsibility of supporting a family.
He is using these historical photographs as the starting point for a project about violence against women, with the intention of developing the work into a self-financed book. The project connects his interest in archives with a broader question: how can images made in another century be re-read from the present without losing the lives contained inside them?
What comes next
Fanchin is also thinking about a project built around his Polaroid Spirit 600 CL and the people he encounters on the road over a fixed period of time. He imagines a book moving between close portraits and the places in which those people live.
It returns him to the same impulse that began with his father’s cameras decades ago: photography as a way of staying close to people, noticing what surrounds him and trusting the feeling that a frame needs to exist.
Follow Andrea Fanchin: @andrea_fanchin
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
