An Hour with Enzo
A 60-minute documentary essay captured in Turin. Documenting the vanishing world of a traditional Italian cobbler through intimacy and raw textures.
“You can find a whole universe in the small space between a hammer and a piece of leather.”
This project was born during a masterclass led by acclaimed photojournalist Alessandro Gandolfi, centered around a simple but brutal challenge: you have exactly one hour to find a story, build trust with a stranger, and shoot a complete reportage.
I found myself in a tiny, dimly lit workshop in Turin, Italy. Inside was Enzo, a traditional cobbler surrounded by the heavy smell of glue, polished leather, and decades of dust.
An hour is nothing, yet it is enough to capture the rhythm of a life spent keeping an old craft alive. As an architect, I am used to looking at massive structures, but in Enzo’s workshop, the architecture was made of small details: the organized chaos of his tools, the worn wooden counter, and the sharp contrast of light coming through the single street-facing window.
The images are a fast, instinctive exploration of craftsmanship. They focus on the hands—stained, precise, and moving with a confidence that only comes from decades of repetition.
What started as a strict technical exercise quickly shifted into a deeper observation. Standing in that workshop, it becomes clear that spaces like Enzo’s are already living on borrowed time, increasingly pushed aside by a faster, more disposable world.
An Hour with Enzo is a quiet tribute to the beauty of slow, manual labor. It stands as an immediate reminder of how photography can freeze a fragile reality, capturing the weight of a disappearing craft in just sixty minutes.
Editorial and curatorial inquiries
The complete series is available as a PDF portfolio for photo editors, curators, and publishers.
