Reflecting | Valentina Cirasola | Author and Designer

Taking photos is a sort of amusement we all do. Professional and non professionals photographers, we all want to lock time in place and remember those moments years later. I remember when photos came out of a film and printed on paper. In the back of all my paper photos there is a note and a date. Without those notes attached to each photo, I would completely miss a piece of my life. A photo reflects and records fashion, customs, or manners of an era. It records a landmark that might be no longer there. It reflects people expressions, emotions, good and bad times. Often, we can hear words spoken in a particular situation captured in the photo.

In the London tube, looking at this picture, I can still hear the stranger coming down on the other side, fervently inciting with a “ravish her!” the man who was kissing me on the neck as we were climbing. That man later became my husband. The reflection of that passionate moment, leaves on in this picture. (Click on each photo to view it larger).

London Tube

Carnaby Street was the reflection of a changing society, pop art and fashion reflected the rejection of anything traditional, old ideas and conventionalism. Objects of consumerism started to show up on the market. I saw my first wood hand massagers and didn’t know what to think of it.

Wood Massagers

I saw hanging legs moving like can-can dancers showing a new style of pantyhose in a store resembling a sleazy theatre backstage. Pantyhose was the reflection of a changing fashion.

Hanging Legs

Covent Garden reflected British life, traditional looking stores with wood trims, café with windowpanes, tea time English style. I recall one tourist, an Italian woman, saying to her man the espresso coffee she ordered was not even good enough to wash her feet in it. She had no idea I was listening and understood everything she said. If I didn’t have this picture of Covent Garden reflecting that moment, I would have forgotten that funny episode.

Covent Garden

Street fashion

Wigs

This is really strange, but this reflecting theme took a different meaning for me. Now, so many years later, I am reflecting on the reason I was attracted since a young age to an Anglo-Saxon country, me, a Mediterranean girl, full of life, who loved to improvise and organize things on the spur of the moment. Leaving Italy, family and friends behind to go live in a speaking English country was difficult and the hardest thing I have ever done. In am reflecting on what attracted me to people so different from me, in background, culture, language, beliefs and customs. What attracted me to people saluting with “I see you later, or I call you later” if it doesn’t mean anything? It could mean next year just as well. I am reflecting on the reason, I get to be on my friends’ schedules when I want to have their company for a casual cup of coffee, lucky me! Was it supposed to be my destiny?

I am still reflecting why on mother’s day I have no longer a mother to celebrate….Ciao,
Valentina
http://www.valentinadesigns.com

Valentina Cirasola is an Italian interior designer in business since 1990. She is passionate about colors and all expressive arts. She is a “colorist”. To her, selecting art means to bring out the best energy of her clients and nourish their soul. She trots the world and loves to write travel notes, from which she draws inspiration to design home interiors of her clients .
She is the author of her book on the subject of colors: ©Red-A Voyage Into Colors available on
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