This photograph is perhaps one of the shots to which I am most intimately attached.
On a day of heavy rain in Venice's Fondamente Nove, I had stopped under a porch to find shelter. After a few moments I saw a person hurriedly running in my direction, his pants soaked and his jacket dripping with water despite the umbrella to shelter him.
Instinctively I brought my Leica to my eye, framed the human figure in the geometry of the porch behind him and pressed the shutter release.
Today, looking back at this photograph, I see in that figure with the indistinguishable face the condition of every man of our time: plagued by the weight of responsibilities, subjugated to commitments that fill every moment of our existence, we hurry frantically from one place to another, from one appointment to the next, without having the time to stop and reflect on the real reasons that cause us to act in this way nor questioning the real need to spend our lives, so ephemeral and fast in its pacing, in pursuit of false needs.
