What happens to journalistic photographs once the news has been published, overtaken, and buried beneath years of newer stories—when time stretches the distance between the image and the life it once captured?
This seems to be the question Gabriele Stabile is asking himself as he opens his archive after more than a decade and begins a new creative journey with the photographs stored there. What were once documents of the moment are now transformed into visual meditations—plates, fragments, visions—gathered within the pages of this book.
The creative act, like memory itself, does not restore the past as it was. It leaves traces—marks, scratches, repetitions—turning recollection into emotion: immediate, though dim; reimagined, yet vividly alive.
Swim Till I Sank is an invitation to submerge into the depths of memory—not necessarily to drown, but to drift, to feel, to remember.
“These photographs have been reborn through a kind of dreamlike filter—an expanded space, far larger than precise memory or mere fact. The golden eyes here are also the eyes of memory, which move beyond the captured moment to embrace the expanse of time. They see the beauty and elegance of gestures that echo across distant places, eras, and actions. The Aristotelian unities of photojournalism have vanished for good.
The artist’s gesture now unfolds in two phases: the immediate recording of an event, and the later reworking of the material, once the urgency has faded and, at times, even the exact location of the shot has been forgotten. Imagination becomes a necessary practice—the exercise through which the world regains its truth, its breath, its life.
