Elena Santino is an Italian photographer whose art is infused with elements distinct to her humanistic background: storytelling, care for the transmitted message, and the fluidity that comes with them.
The introversion of her work is just as quiet and subliminal as the grayed-out shadows that frame the subjects. The environment is often used to encapsulate the point of focus in a protective shell, preserving detail in an attempt to maintain its untainted quality. The focus falls more on the concept than on the aesthetic—on the unspoken actions that precede the captured scene.
Santino creates visual poetry out of the ordinary. She appreciates the quiet beauty of everyday moments that build our lives. She is not interested in staging but has a keen eye for the composition. The artist takes viewers on a treasure hunt through narrow Italian streets, and all that she collects are glimpses of a day experienced without pretenses.
Artist’s Note:
“My humanistic background has deeply shaped the way I look at the world. I learned to read images as if they were texts, to search within details for what unsettles the surface of the visible. Photography was first a passion, long before becoming my profession, and it still represents for me a space of questioning.
In the images I present, I explore the everyday at the moment it opens into a threshold. A leaking tap, an egg breaking while being softly boiled, and fragments arranged on a wooden surface: minimal, domestic gestures, seemingly neutral. Yet it is precisely there that something shifts.
I am not interested in portraying the exceptional but in observing the instant when the ordinary loses its stability. I look for that ‘broken stitch in the net’—a subtle opening through which something beyond the apparent reality becomes perceptible: a tension, a fragility, a possibility of meaning that emerges quietly.
While my professional practice often leads me to document celebration and shared moments, my personal research moves toward the margins, within interstices where the image does not assert but suggests.
For me, photographing means inhabiting that crack.”
Read our “Aberration” issue in full
The 31 artists featured in RAWGUE. Magazine’s 5th issue stray from the expected, taking untrodden paths, contemplating imperfection, solitude in its many forms, and the ongoing process of self-acceptance. Through shifting perspectives, their works explore what it means to look at oneself from the outside, as if through broken glass.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
