Layers of meaning: using double exposures to connect people and place

The story of those who inhabit the Sassi, a district in the Italian city of Matera, is one of resilience. The warren of stone dwellings dates from prehistoric times but in the early 20th century its inhabitants – mostly peasants and refugees – were living in extreme poverty. It became a national disgrace, and in the 1950s, thousands of residents were forcibly relocated; settlements were bricked up and the district was left to decay. The turnaround began in the 1990s, when the Sassi became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Now tourism has injected new life into the area and the community has reformed.

In 2019, French-Thai documentary photographer Aline Deschamps was one of many photographers invited to Matera for a three-month artistic residency, sponsored by Canon. The opportunity to document the region's transformation resulted in her creating Fiore di resilencia, a double exposure project that combines urban scenes of faded structures and plants clinging to life in what looks to be an utterly inhospitable environment with soulful portraits of the area's inhabitants.

In one sense, Aline's layered photographic approach is a visual representation of the district's complex history. The project blends several photographic genres into one: portraiture, urban landscape and street photography. But for Aline, it all comes under a single umbrella. "In the end, I'm only doing one genre, which is documentary," she says. "Whether it's by posing someone, or capturing life on the street, I'm just telling the stories of these people."

Here, she shares five lessons she learned from using double exposures to document life in the Sassi.

"Matera is made of stone, so you'd think there'd be no life in the Sassi, but there are wild plants everywhere." she says. "Even though the soil is not fertile, plants still manage to thrive. The inhabitants of the Sassi were completely rejected; everything was done to deter them from living there, and yet they remain. Using the double exposures as a metaphor, it was this resilience that I wanted to portray."

The residents were happy to participate in Aline's project, which meant she could experiment with different compositions. Her portraits vary in form: some are dynamic street-style shots, while others feel more personal.

The project taught her the value of intimacy, even under difficult circumstances – Aline doesn't speak much Italian, and yet she was still able to forge a connection. "Even now, I think, 'How did I do that? How did I communicate?'" she says. "It gave me the confidence to not be afraid of meeting new people."

Aline was welcomed into people's homes, and invited to share family meals and attend religious ceremonies, but connecting with a subject can also be about smaller moments, as she discovered while shooting street portraits. "Sometimes there is a moment where you take somebody's photo; they see you, and you exchange a smile," she says. "You end up talking to that person, and you think, 'Okay, let's do a second photo now that you're aware I exist,' and it becomes a portrait."

Aline needed a flexible setup for her style of documentary photography and chose two lenses, the Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L USM and the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM, to cover the focal range she needed.

"The EF 50mm f/1.2L USM is definitely the lens I prefer for portraits," she says. "I can get a blurred background and really sharp details – I just love it. I use the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM when I need to be more versatile – when I'm in a small room, for example, and can't step back far enough to use the 50mm."

Both lenses are relatively compact, which was useful when discretion was key. "A larger lens might have scared people," Aline says. "I don't think anyone would have spoken to me if I'd had a bigger lens. I think they'd have thought I was spying on them. People noticed me with my small lenses, but I'd end up talking to them and usually be able to shoot a portrait."

Aline created her double exposures in post-production, keeping an open mind and embracing opportunities to experiment. "Other people may do it differently, but I like to try things out," she says. Once Aline found two complementary photos, she worked out which parts of each image she wanted to be most prominent in the final version. Using Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom®'s Brush tool, Aline painted the sections she wanted to stand out, such as faces, and then adjusted the opacity of each image in different areas.

"You can select the parts you want to erase," she explains. "It becomes like painting, enhancing the parts you want to show and removing those you don't. It's something I really enjoy. It's similar to developing film in black and white: only the parts of the photo that you put the chemicals on will be developed. There are no rules; it's just a different creative process."