My oldest pictures in the trash

It was the year 2001 and I had just finished my graduation. I was really undecided about what to do in my life and still I am.
However, I asked my mom to buy a present for my birthday and here she came with a camera that I requested.
It was a second hand camera, the Pentax Z 10 an autofocus 35mm film SLR camera was my first camera ever owned by me.
I started with B&W films and soon I had tried almost all the possible brands and ISO before I finally switched to Kodak TRI X 400.

At that time I lived in Parma, Italy, a small town in the north of Italy. Parma had nothing special to portrait in winter except for the fog, the old streets and the churches. Gradually I became bored with the same results and I started playing with the manual focus to change my view of the city. I fell in love with blurry images and I took a lot of them....Yes, tons of films of blurry pictures and lots of money wasted for that.*

I participated to a few exhibitions and got really excited about that. People's comments, their reactions to my work was the best part of it. The possibility to talk about your creation with people interested in it was the best part along with the satisfaction of seeing something done after my hard work.

I kept taking pictures in the coming years especially during my journeys.
In New York I spent a bit more than two month and I was able to capture all those tall buildings that I had only seen in a Scorzese movie before.

I got stuck with my Parma project (the blurry images) for quite long and even if I had taken a lot of other pictures between 2001 and 2005, I considered Ghosts (my Parma project) the main and maybe the only for many years. I could not abandon that experience and look forward because I was sentimentally involved with Ghosts, the pictures I took represented my feeling of being there at the time, the loneliness I experienced the desire of telling the others what I was going through.

I took the opportunity to free some space in my place and get rid of something that must have been thrown in the bin long time ago. I just didn't have the time to...
I am happy today and I feel good at not seeing those large prints anymore in my bedroom closet.

I decided to start with this post because seeing those pictures again after so many years woke my memories up and I just wanted to share them with you.

*in the end the money wasn't wasted at all because I learnt a lot even from shooting completely white or completely black pictures.