Fine Art Print Collection
New Fine Art Collection: The Duality of Recco
Aug
A few years ago, Recco became home.
It’s a small town tucked between the Ligurian Sea and the coastal hills, in Liguria’s Gulf of Paradise. Sure, it’s a small town, yet somehow it has always felt much bigger to me than its footprint on the map.
Maybe that’s because there is so much happening within such a small space.
The sea pushes right up against the town, while green hills rise almost immediately around it. Colorful facades sit beneath the railway viaduct that crosses the center of Recco, while the enormous A12 motorway stretches high across the valley behind it. Fishermen, swimmers, surfers, boats, trains, traffic and everyday life all occupy different layers of the same landscape.
And the rhythm of the town changes with the seasons. Summer brings more life to the lungomare, the beaches and the water, while the cooler months settle into something noticeably quieter.
Living here has given me the chance to experience all of those versions slowly.
Not as someone passing through for a few days with a camera, but through the repetition of everyday life. Walking along the waterfront. Watching the light change across familiar buildings. Seeing the sea completely flat one morning and transformed by weather the next. Returning to the same streets, beaches and viewpoints often enough that I’ve begun noticing photographs I probably would have walked straight past before.
Over time, Recco has become one of those places where I rarely need to go looking very far for something interesting to photograph.
Sometimes it’s the landscape. Other times, it’s architecture, color, or the way Recco’s enormous pieces of infrastructure intersect with such a compact coastal town.
More often than not, though, I find myself drawn to people simply living their lives beside the sea – fishermen working along the waterfront, surfers waiting for the conditions to come together, or small human figures almost disappearing into the scale of the coastline.
And then there are those moments when something I’ve walked past a hundred times suddenly looks completely different – because of the light, the weather, or simply the person who happens to be standing there.
Gradually, all of those different versions of Recco have started to add up.
That slow accumulation of moments is what this collection has grown from.
The Duality of Recco brings together 68 works of art exploring the many sides of the place I now call home – landscapes, architecture, street scenes, fishing, surfing, festivals, fireworks and the quieter moments that happen somewhere in between.
Together, they aren’t intended to show one definitive version of Recco.
I’m not sure that version exists.
Instead, they bring together the Recco I’ve come to know – a town that can feel quiet and lively, intimate and expansive, ordinary and extraordinary, depending on the season, the weather, the light, or simply where you happen to be standing.
Explore the Recco Collection
The complete collection brings together 68 works of fine art created here in Recco. Below, I’ve selected a few highlights that explore some of the different sides of the town and the ideas that run through the collection.
View The Entire Collection
Bridges, Concrete, and Layers of Recco
Recco has a way of layering things on top of one another.
Colorful residential buildings sit beneath enormous concrete viaducts. The railway crosses directly above the center of town. Older stone structures remain woven into a landscape that has continued to build around them.
That overlap is something I’ve repeatedly been drawn to photograph.
In Bridgedom R, a compressed perspective brings the towering A12 motorway viaduct together with the colorful residential buildings below, stacking concrete, architecture and the green hills behind them into a single frame.
Ferroviario takes a very different approach. Rendered in black and white, the railway viaduct becomes almost entirely about form – the enormous arch, repeating lines, overhead cables and the train caught within the structure.
Then there is Ponte Romano n.2, where an older piece of Recco’s built landscape becomes the starting point for something more creative and interpretive.
What interests me in these photographs isn’t necessarily the engineering itself.
It’s the visual relationship between things that, at first glance, almost seem as though they shouldn’t belong together.
Concrete against colorful facades.
Infrastructure against green hills.
Old stone against a town that has continued changing around it.
Photographed tightly, those relationships become less about documenting Recco and more about breaking it down into layers – architecture, texture, scale and contrast existing within the same frame.
The Guardians of the Coast
Recco has two small fari marking the edges of its waterfront, and both appear repeatedly throughout this collection.
Neither is particularly imposing. Against the scale of the Ligurian Sea, the surrounding hills and even the infrastructure of the town itself, they can appear almost impossibly small.
And yet, photographically, they have become two of Recco’s most recognizable visual anchors for me.
Works such as Breakwater, From the Surf to the Mountains and Vigili place them within very different versions of the same coastline.
Sometimes they sit quietly against the sea. Other times they become tiny points of reference within a much larger landscape.
I think that contrast is part of what keeps drawing me back to them.
They don’t dominate Recco’s coastline.
They simply hold their place within it.
Facades, Details, and Everyday Beauty
Ligurian towns have always pulled me in through their details. Colorful facades, green shutters, decorative stonework and little pieces of architecture that become so familiar to the people who live around them that they can almost disappear into the background.
Almost.
Works such as Vista Mare and La Facciata lean into the warmth and repetition of Recco’s architecture – rows of windows, shutters and sunlit facades transformed into compositions of color and pattern.
A CITTÆ DE RECCO looks somewhere else entirely, isolating one of the town’s sculptural details and allowing its figures, texture and form to become the subject.
These are not the grand views of Recco.
They’re the smaller pieces of the town – the things you might pass every day like Living Walls without giving them much thought, until the light, the framing or a camera gives you a reason to look again.
Human Moments
Some of the quietest works in this collection are built around people caught in small, isolated moments.
In One Step Closer, a lone figure walks along the top of Recco’s breakwater, surrounded by little more than stone, sea and open sky.
The Moment was photographed on that same breakwater on a completely different day. This time, two people sit together at the edge of the sea, caught in those few seconds of intimacy just before a kiss.
Then there is The Man Who Sold the World, where another solitary figure sits on Recco’s opposite breakwater, staring quietly into the water below.
None of these moments were staged.
I don’t know what happened immediately before them, or what happened after.
And I think that is part of what draws me to photographs like these.
For a few seconds, someone else’s life crosses with mine. I notice them, raise the camera, and preserve a tiny fragment of a story that I’ll probably never know the rest of.
The photograph leaves just enough behind for us to imagine it.
Life Along the Water
Naturally, the sea is present throughout this art collection of Recco.Â
I Pescatori, Recco Nord and a Recco in Alto explore different perspectives on coastal life. Some of the travel art prints emphasize scale – placing small human figures against vast landscapes. Others focus on the quiet routines that unfold along the shoreline, sunbathing, playing or simply watching. It feels somewhat normal and yet majestic at the same time.Â
Surfing in Recco
Surfing has been part of my life for a long time, so seeing it become part of the landscape here in Recco has always felt a little familiar.
The Mediterranean doesn’t offer waves every day. Far from it.
There can be long stretches when the sea is almost completely flat. The surfers are still here, of course. The boards are still here. Everyone is just waiting.
Are you still a surfer when you’re not surfing?
Apparently, yes.
Then the conditions shift, the sea changes character, boards begin appearing along the waterfront and an entirely different version of Recco comes to life.
That unpredictability is part of what makes photographing it so interesting.
In The Last Rider, the setting is unmistakably Recco. There’s a classic Endless Summer feeling to it – a lone surfer still out in the water as the light quickly fades, seemingly unwilling to let a single wave pass him by.
Surfer brings me closer to the action, catching one of those brief moments when the waiting is finally over and everything comes together on the face of a wave.
Then there is The Plunge, photographed in black and white as a surfer makes his way into the water while others wait farther offshore.
Together, these photographs capture another side of Recco’s duality.
A town full of surfers beside a sea that doesn’t always surf.
Long periods of waiting interrupted by those brief windows when the conditions finally come together – and everyone who has been watching the water knows exactly what to do.
Fire, Celebration, and Transformation
Then there is the other Recco.
The loud one.
The one filled with fire, smoke, explosions and enough light to completely transform places I normally know by daylight.
Many of the most dramatic works in this collection come from Recco’s celebrations, particularly the annual Sagra del Fuoco – when the town’s relationship with fire becomes impossible to ignore.
Works such as Fire Storm, Explosions in the Sky, L’Ultima Stella, Hyperdrive, Blood Moon and Prayer With Fire explore that side of Recco in very different ways.
Some remain recognizable as fireworks, flames and human moments.
Others move much further away from straightforward documentation.
Light stretches. Smoke becomes color. Explosions turn into shapes that exist for only fractions of a second before disappearing completely.
That is what I find so interesting about photographing events like this.
The camera can take something incredibly brief and chaotic and give it permanence.
For one moment, familiar pieces of Recco become something else entirely – abstract, almost otherworldly, and completely removed from the quiet coastline I might have photographed in exactly the same place only days before.
These photographs preserve some of that spectacle, but they also preserve the transformation itself.
You can read more about my experience photographing the Sagra del Fuoco in Recco here.
The Recco I’ve Come to Know
After 68 works of art, I’m still not sure I could point to any one photograph and say, this is Recco.
I think that’s part of what has kept me photographing it.
The more familiar this town has become, the more I seem to notice. I can walk the same stretch of coastline I’ve walked a hundred times before and still find myself stopping because the light has changed, someone has entered the frame, the sea is behaving differently, or something ordinary suddenly feels worth looking at again.
Maybe that is the real story behind this collection.
Not an attempt to define Recco, but an accumulation of the moments that have slowly helped me understand it.
My hope is that these photographs allow you to experience some of that for yourself – not simply Recco as a destination on the Ligurian coast, but the Recco I’ve come to know by living here, walking it, watching it change and continuing to photograph whatever catches my eye along the way.
Available Now in the Shop
The complete Recco Collection is now available as fine art prints, with a range of sizes and framing options available.
Each of these 68 works was created here in the place I now call home, and it means a great deal to finally bring them together as one collection.
Whether you connect with the coastline, the architecture, the surfers, the quieter human moments or Recco at its most explosive, I hope there is something here that speaks to the version of this town that catches your eye.
And if one of these photographs eventually finds its way onto a wall somewhere far beyond the Gulf of Paradise, that feels like a pretty wonderful ending to the story.
Thank you, as always, for supporting my work.
Like what you’re seeing so far? Explore the full collection.
