Happiness is when the sadness subsides.

Coffee and espresso, I use as tools to push my mind into gear. It's also good for you, black and fresh. It contains very healthy tannins and antioxidants taken this way.

Personally, having to deal with depression, coffee helps me in the dark times to feel better and it motivates me, along with intense physical exercise it keeps the Beast at Bay and the darkness away. Thank you Lavazza for the aroma, taste and happy ritual of your delicious coffee.

 

My work forces me to travel all the time. Flights, delays, lost baggage, jet lag, endless journeys onboard the weirdest means of transport.

No matter how far I travel, I can never escape the way I can when I am behind my camera. That is my real break from the world. Those are the moments I dedicate to myself.

When I am shooting I want to get right inside the very nature of things, be the storyteller of experiences and relive them from the inside. I am not interested in shades and through the lens I can see the world plainly: it is either black or white. Above all black, because of the intensity it conveys, the strength, the sense of cleanliness. Black does not lie, in a certain way it is clear. Just like my models. Just like my coffee.

‘What’s on the artist’s mind while drinking Lavazza coffee’: this was the idea behind the self-portrait. My main inspiration is the human body.

I have always loved what light does on a body in the studio, and how a landscape of skin is created. So naturally, the body is what’s on my mind.

Inside my studio, a childhood memory is analysed, rearranged, chopped up and questioned again and again until its faint outline comes into focus on the ground-glass of my camera. I fire the shutter freezing the memory forever in the exploding light.

There is a fundamental difference between the photographer Elliott Erwitt and the artist André S. Solidor.

Elliott likes his Lavazza espresso neat and 'corto', while André likes his macchiato 'lungo'. 

But it is fair to say that in one way or another both are united in their fidelity to Lavazza coffee.

Like most photographers, I definitely prefer to be on the other side of the camera, so when I was asked to work on this commission it was important that it was done with irreverence and most importantly to have some fun.

The most euphoric and excitable entity I know is Frank MacKay, Frank is a French Bulldog and my best friend. Whenever I come home from whatever place,  he is always there - loyal, steadfast and ready to eat any of my clothing or any important documents in my possession, he hates it when I am away and he has eaten two passports and a drivers license, so this proves that he really wants me at home with him.

I wanted to tell his story in the image and make people smile for a second. I believe that Life is fun and every second should be savoured.

A patinated 150 year old wall, top lit, an emptied elevator shaft, which now serves as stairwell. Perhaps an unlikely destination for a photographic series of artists—yet at

some point it became a familiar common denominator – almost a stage – not only for my subjects, but also for my work.