Epic Face Plants
Breaking Instagram one satirical image at a time, Italian photographer Sandro Giordano builds elaborate setups involving people falling down and their stuff flying everywhere. For his ‘In Extremis (Bodies With No Regret)’ series, he recruits live models to pose for hours on end while he arranges the fallout of their falldown all around them. That’s it — that’s his thing. And why not? Epic face plants are funny, they just are.
The idea for the ongoing series came from two incidents. The first happened when a friend broke his leg while trying to prevent his phone from falling in the water, while the second was a spill of his own, a bike mishap during which he instinctively held onto the things he was carrying rather than protect himself from bodily harm.
Which is to say his staged tumbles, entertaining though they are, come with cautionary tales. “My photographs are short stories about a falling-down world,” he says, while not denying the schadenfreude appeal. “Each shot tells of worn-out characters who, as if a sudden black-out of mind and body took over, let themselves crash with no attempt to save themselves because of fatigue. They reach their limit beyond which their false self cannot go.”
