Francesco Chiot is an independent photographer and videomaker, working in Trieste and experimenting with various photographic techniques.
He works with analogue photography, infrared photography and makes immersive 360° videos.
He has collaborated with artists, performers and musicians to explore the relationship between identity, perception and expression. Until 2018, he curated the documentation and communication of public events at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. It also collaborates with international events such as the Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival and with the International Talent Support (ITS). He worked as a set photographer on the movie set of The Red Door (La Porta Rossa). We met him in Trieste on a cold day at the beginning of January 2023. We asked him a few questions about his work and his profession.

Francesco Chiot was also a lecturer at Visual Hub with the Small Photographic Gym course.

Hi Francesco, what was your first camera?
In our family we always had non-professional cameras not related to artistic use and we took a lot of pictures when travelling. The first photo I remember having taken, I was on a school trip to Cansiglio in the primary school. It was a horrible selfie with a film camera from way too close. I’ll describe the photograph: there was this beautiful mountain panorama with a blurred shadow of a face in the middle: it was me trying to take a picture of myself -an ante-litteram selfie that came out very, very badly – but I was in primary school. Not because I was drawn to the camera but because I was drawn to the pleasure of making memories, of creating memories that I would later look back on. Especially with these “point-and-shoot” cameras like the Olympuswhich were very popular at the time. So if you want to go for first experiences, they are such kind of experiences. However, this gave me this idea of taking my camera with me to create memories. Then there was my grandmother who had a camera from the sixties, almost fancy in some ways, which I am very attached to. It is a Konika Auto S2 with a metal telemeter, fixed but very bright lens that she used on her travels, and I always had this urge to leave my parents’ plastic camera and ask my grandmother Can I borrow your camera, Grandma?

E la nonna te la prestava?
Occasionally yes, but further down the years, let’s say more towards the high school. I started to use it more often when she stopped photographing and so she started to leave it with me more often and would say ‘well now, you can use it’.

And you kept Grandma’s archive?
I kept all her travel slides, because my grandmother was a great traveller. She got in her 127 and travelled around Europe and I mean all of Europe really, from Turkey to Morocco.

Can you tell me about your background and how you managed to turn photography into your profession?
If I wanted to reconnect with the speech made earlier, it was actually a slow and natural process. I used my first reflex camera when I was 18 and I started experimenting, with depth of field, with the rules of thirds, I experimented with black and white photos, black and white film strictly taken to the shop to be developed. So there was a long phase of experimentation that now when I look back at it I feel a lot of love because it was a time when I was thinking a lot about photography on a technical level, on the level of what I liked to do and what not, on the level of committing a lot of time. And even though at the time one might feel like an ‘amateur’ (which to me is a horrible term) looking back on it, I was putting passion, love into it which was a good. At a certain point, like so many ‘amateurs’, I did some group exhibitions of photos with the MIMEXITY association and I happened to do a couple of personal exhibitions, although we cannot call them personal because I always see them as an embellishment of a cafe, a sort of putting my ego on the walls of the places I already used to go. But this experience also gave me the idea that, through curating, through selection, through work, I could create a message a little more complex than a single photo, create a series, let’s call it a portfolio, let’s say a message composed of several photos. While doing these exhibitions, I had been contacted by a friend who had started organising gigs and asked me to be a regular presence at their events. Their business grew over the years and so I found myself on bigger and bigger stages, more and more important, and so, with consistency, I continued both my personal experimentation and this ongoing collaboration with live music. All this time I was working as a software engineer locked in an office for the duration of the sun, until somehow I ‘’cracked up‘’ and had this personal crisis that led me to say ‘’I must change my life‘’. One day I sat in a café by the sea in Portorož and to the sound of Mojiti, with a nice blank sheet of paper in front of me, I wrote down all the things I liked to do, what I knew how to do, and how I was going to totally change my life. Among these things was photography, which I was very sceptical about financially – and I still am today. I probably should have been a taxi driver, as I like driving and it would have been a more remunerative profession. But going back to that day, I said to myself: I could be a photographer, but only if I do it well. So if they take me at this very important school that I found, the school that I think is the most important school in the world that I could do, the dream of a lifetime that won’t happen anyway, in short IF they take me then I will be a photographer. And I was accepted. And so nothing, I thought ‘This will be fate’.

What did you send as a portfolio?
I sent a portfolio and a statement, a CV. It was quite a complicated selection. Many years later, I looked back at my old photo portfolio, it was a portfolio of approximately ten photos, each one different from the other.

And what does it seem to you looking at it now?
Looking at it now, I still see some elements in it that are characterising what I like to do. I remember one day a teacher in one of the first lessons asked us to put our work on the table, so that he could tell us what he thought of it, a rough description of the starting point. The school focused on photojournalism and not everyone came from a journalism background. I remember that on that occasion she said something I had never thought of, that my photos had a before and an after, and like a frame in a film they were still moments in time, but expressing a previous and a subsequent action.
Some of those photos were concert photos, so imagine a still image of a very large live event, where from this image you can guess what is going on, a before and after. Others were slightly more, as they are called in English, ‘candid’ photosmore spontaneous photos… portraits of friends, portraits of people, photos of trips with friends. Snapshots that also had a certain cinematic quality, but which, in their being static, had an implicit dynamism. And this comment is one thing I see again and again when I look at my photos, the idea of the out of time. The work I did with infrared was also a bit about getting out of time and space. Large prints, to take you out of time in that moment, into the alternative space of this dreamscape that seemed real but was somewhere else; a bit of an escape from reality. So, yes, my process was completely turned upside down with this school in New York also because I completely cut off from my life in Trieste and the impact of the personal change is not to be underestimated.

How long were you in New York and how old were you when you left Trieste?
At the age of 33, I moved in New York It was 2015, really late to make such a professional career, because then the people who did this school with me were 10 years younger than me and I still feel that I am lagging behind the people I am dealing with. But that was alright, because I made certain decisions later on. This school taught me how to work, and it put me to work, because not only did they give me a scholarship, but after a few months they hired me and introduced me to life in New York. Life in New York is very different from what it can be in Trieste, both in terms of how one lives the city and how one lives art and photography and the work of photography in this context. New York is the capital of the press, of journalism.
In 2017 I returned to Trieste, not by choice but by circumstance, with a renewed idea of working hard to change what I had seen as a possible reality here before I left, a stubborn reality. Not to change it in relation to others, but to put myself out there in some way and somehow manage to have a work situation more like the one I had in America and not just end up having to make compromises.

What do you feel you have achieved in this city?
I don’t know, I’m still very confused. I’m quite a private person anyway, and I always struggled even before New York to integrate myself in what are small circles, photographic circles, work-related friendships and all these kinds of things. And in this case, the school had helped me because, for better or worse, it had given me friendships and a start in my career. However, often my feeling isolated is due to my own behaviour, my attitude. Because there are small realities anyway. It seems to me that there is a lot of competition, a lack of collaboration and somehow an instinctive feeling for everyone, whether professionals or even the arts-related professions, that it is a very small bubble and you have to fight to be the king of this very small bubble. In New York, it seemed like the world was so wide that there was no point in competing. But by helping each other, we can break through common boundaries and raise the ceiling of possibility. A completely different concept of collaboration and living something that belongs to everyone because nobody owns it. It seems to me that the restricted environment is also due to the geographical and cultural boundaries of the city, and that this leads to blind competition for a perceived sense of losing something that does not really exist. And I don’t want to get used to that feeling. What I can do is continue to do the things I do, following what I think is right and trying to make as few compromises and conflicts as possible.

Let’s come to Trieste and the cinema
Trieste looks good and this is also very noticeable in La Porta Rossa and it is the first comment that is made by people watching the series. The footage of Trieste is extremely beautiful and the city deserves all this success because it is really photogenic, and it could be developed more given that it is a city in a bit of a state of recession and there are so many empty spaces, with so many stopped industries and empty warehouses. Film is first and foremost an industry, a craft that needs as many workspaces as possible for as long as possible, and Trieste certainly has that potential. Then to give you an example, Vancouver is a film capital in North America because it has a whole series of incentives on film, incentives on the digital film industry, and it has a very neutral look so you can make any city in North America look like Vancouver, you just have to change a few details like the mailboxes, the signs, these kinds of things. For Trieste, it could be the same, it would be possible to characterise much of central Europe.
FVG Film Commission and Casa del Cinema give a great deal of help, providing a whole series of incentives and fiscal and operational tools for productions, but if there were more stable spaces for cinema, if there were a ‘Cinecittà’, but not from the point of view of sets necessarily, but from the point of view of production, carpentry, costumes, the art department, it would certainly give a further incentive to cinema in Trieste.

How many hours do you do on set, how do you relate to the locations. Do you have to do location surveys before or do you go and shoot during the shooting days?
I must make a premise about the nature of the role of the stage photographer. It is a preliminary remark that then makes you understand the rest. The stage photographer is the least necessary figure in the making of a film. He is exactly the kind of person who, if he fell into a ravine while filming, the film would not stop for a minute. We are less important than the catering, less important than the drivers, less important than the toolmakers, the lighting, the costume designers, the make-up artists, the whole directing apparatus, the vans themselves. If one of them suffered a ‘mal de notte’ (health problem in the Trieste dialect), as they say in Trieste, there would be a delay in production, sometimes a long one. The stage photographer is sometimes better off absent. This means that my job is first and foremost not to be there, to erase any selfishness and to be at the service of everyone else’s work. This means not having site visits, not having precise schedules, not having dedicated slots with actors. I will always have to find the time to shoot, to be clever in finding the little corners where I don’t interfere with the film production, the work of others, the tiredness, the needs of the actors, and where I can still manage to bring home the work I’ve been asked to do. The work is not everyday, let’s say in the production of a serial is about 30 per cent so one day out of three, about forty days out of three months. But the moment you are summoned you work 12 to 15 hours a day like everyone else, day or night, one location, two locations, three locations, like everyone else. It is a job of long waits, because the shot is a moment, but the preparation is long, the repetitions are long, and generally waiting is a common thing.

How much equipment do you have with you?
Most of the time I take very little stuff with me. A bag containing three lenses, three batteries, a battery charger and a camera body. Clearly no need for artificial lights, quite the contrary! Whatever I need – an extra light for some special reason – I can simply ask the staff. I happened to get a panel for some stage needs, on the spot. Because first of all mine is a job of invisibility, a flash would make me the most hated person on the set. Then, if there are portrait needs, these are somewhat planned and so I leave a flash a light a tripod in the bag so I can take a portrait on the spot.

Forgive me for asking a simple question, but the click of the machine?
Thankfully, in 2023 there are mirrorless cameras that don’t make any noise at all, I could be attached to the microphone and only the rustle of my clothes would be heard.

I have one last question: 3 photographs by other photographers that you were impressed by and if you can describe them to me
One photograph for sure, and here again there is a big relationship with time and space, comes from the Open Shutter series by Michael Wesely who was the photographer who documented the construction of MoMA. These are photographs of single exposures lasting months or years. He had placed boxes, with a whole series of filters and an emulsion designed by him, at strategic points where MoMA would develop, including around the camera. And this long exposure means that only things that have been standing still for a while have been impressed, highlighting the layers of progress. This sequence of lines and columns, small movements of light, tells in a very abstract way, in a single frame, the story of the construction of a building. He had previously worked for years on long exposures, starting with the tracks of the sun, documenting the sun’s movement throughout the year, moving up and down in relation to the seasons and the stars. All this, always working on exposures that lasted months or years, which I found incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it, and with my own equipment I’ve only been able to get minutes, whereas talking about hours is problematic, not least because with modern devices the battery sooner or later runs out and the pixels stop recording. These techniques have many digital limitations. Anyway, this is a photograph I keep with me, it has always been a favourite and I have been looking for the book to remember it in for a long time.
The second is by Jonas Bendiksen, who made a long documentary on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the satellite states, which was actually called Satellites. Within this series, one day, I don’t remember in which of these former Soviet republics, he had come across the remains of a space rocket, probably a Soyuz capsule, which had returned to earth in a field, and in these remains were people cannibalising what they needed. It was a green field with these huge metal pipes. And as he approached to take the photograph, a multitude of butterflies appeared between him and the subject. So what you see in the photo is a green field with two very industrial metal pipes, a person coming out of the pipe and the space covered with these white dots, which it is difficult to tell if it is snow or something else, but which are actually butterflies. It is almost a pseudo-industrial utopia. I really liked this being out of place and out of time, almost like a science fiction film within a picture, and it’s very different from the rest of his work – which is about rusting metal, crumbling buildings, these Soviet communities that don’t have so much to do with utopia anymore, whereas this is the only one of the whole series that instead takes you into a more dreamlike state outside the grim reality of the collapse of communism.
The third and last photo is inside a book of comics and photographs called The Photographer which tells the story of the author, a photographer sent to document the work of Médecins Sans Frontières during the Russian war in Afghanistan. This young Frenchman, who has never been in the field, is sent to Afghanistan to follow a humanitarian convoy on horseback through a series of mountainous areas and, ‘spoiler’, his adventure does not go so well. He is betrayed by his guide, he is betrayed by other guides, he is robbed, he is left in the middle of the mountains in the middle of the Afghan winter with no food, no supplies and he thinks he is going to die in the middle of the fog at the top of a pass… at which point he unties his horse to let him go, but it stays close to him. You can’t see much in the fog, and he, lying on the ground in what he believes will be his final resting place, takes out his camera and takes a picture of the horse. Spoiler number 2 survives and the book goes on. It’s a very good book because his whole story is documented by his photographs, mixed in with the cartoonish account of what happened in the meantime. And I find it an extremely realistic insight, more real than real, and extremely emotional because he takes a photograph as his last gesture before letting go – and his last photograph is a portrait of his horse, his faithful companion, in the mist with his eyes closed.