notes on light and rain is a photographic essay by Mattia Massaiu, created during his internship at CRU Creative Hub and his stay in the city of Porto.

A compulsive traveller with an established documentary style, the Italian photographer challenges his own creative process in this project, exploring different techniques and aesthetic choices. The rainy, nocturnal streets of Porto offer Mattia new impressions, translated into black-and-white images in which flash combined with long exposures inscribes the drawn traces of people’s movements and their umbrellas, as well as textures revealed by the interaction through the luminous contact with wet surfaces.

«Human presences emerge and dissolve among light, shadow, reflections, and movement, in which Porto appears fragile, dynamic, at times suspended, distant from its most recognisable image. The work seeks to convey an intimate and transitory experience, where light cuts through the scene, making visible something that exists only momentarily before fading away.»

notes on ligth and rain materialises, in the exhibition, as an unfolding of the project’s different phases: a final series presented as small-format prints, like windows that require an almost voyeuristic proximity, extended also through a zine, as a medium of montage and sequencing; a video documenting the dynamics of photographic capture and the city in motion; and, finally, images displayed in lightboxes, bearing witness to aesthetic and formal choices and to the selective nature of photographic recording. Street photography asserts itself as a practice of the instant.

«These are notes gathered while walking, minimal variations that reveal how the shifting of light also changes the way we perceive space.»

notes on light and rain offers a visual experience of Porto, where the tension between light and shadow takes centre stage in this invitation to reflect on the transience and the fleeting brilliance of the urban space.