Through Unfiltered Eyes: Francesco Candido’s Photography and Something Quintessentially Human

© Francesco Candido

It’s become more and more obvious to me that my focus is interviewing kids—young photographers, non-professionals, amateurs in the most affectionate sense of the word—those who do it for the love of the craft. Here is one such character, as I have understood him.

Pour35mm, or Francesco Candido, 25, is a Roman photographer. We speak in a mix of Italian and English, slipping from one language to another. His South African accent—an inheritance from his mother—has been reshaped by a two-year stint in London.

We met over a video call on a Wednesday in early March. He fidgets with his longish blonde hair, cigarette in hand. We talk about the usual: Rome, music, work, and the trials and tribulations of being young artists. He could be a character in Linklater’s Slacker or a Jim Jarmusch piece—unguarded, disarming, a little naïve but completely engaged, thinking out loud, working things out in real time, without too much posturing.

There’s sincerity there, even if it sometimes leans into the idealistic. A mix of earnestness, self-doubt, and big ideas. He’s worldly, yet quintessentially Roman—lighthearted, instinctively performative, yet entirely natural. His Rome is not the gilded postcard of tourists’ reveries but something raw, lived-in, unpicturesque. A city of hidden narratives, where hundreds of people move through it like invisible cities, each with quietly unfolding little worlds. Francesco’s photographs capture that intimacy, that rawness—less about composition, more about connection. Somewhere between documentary and something deeply personal.

Ways of Seeing

"You’re both in front of and behind the camera," I say. "Did modeling shape your eye as a photographer?"

"For me, it was very useful to be a model first," he tells me. "When you're on a shoot, there are all these dead moments, you know? People go on their phones, read a book. But I was always watching. I was looking at what the photographer was doing, how he moved, what his vision was. I was learning."

© Francesco Candido

It makes sense. He photographs people the way someone who’s been watched would: with a certain attentiveness, a quiet responsibility. He understands that to be in front of a lens is to be vulnerable, and so his instinct is to create comfort, to move fluidly between directions and letting things unfold naturally. "I think I know how to put that person in a comfortable space because I was also on that side of the camera," he says. "It’s almost an instinctual knowledge, you know? I don’t overthink it—I just do it."

Black, White, and Everything in Between

His work is almost exclusively black and white. I ask him why. Is it aesthetic, emotional, or something else?

"I love the aesthetic of it, for sure," he says. "But also, it’s the purest form. Photography started in black and white. I’m doing what photographers did at the beginning."

© Francesco Candido

There’s something about stripping away color that makes an image feel more timeless, more essential. "Black and white makes you look closer—it forces attention beyond color," he explains. It’s also practical. "Developing color film is expensive," he adds, laughing. "I do my own developing. Every six rolls or so, I meet a friend—he's a pro, though he doesn’t call himself a photographer—and we develop together. It’s a beautiful way to share something."

People often ask him if he has the digital versions of his photos in color. "I say yes, but when they ask to see them, I say no," he grins. "I chose black and white. I like that people see me as a black-and-white photographer."

Power, Ownership, and the Ethics of Looking

Susan Sontag once wrote that photography turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. I ask him if he agrees—if there’s a kind of power dynamic in portraiture.

He considers this. "Photography, for me, is about seeing—and about being," he says. "It’s a way of stopping time, of reliving and re-feeling. Every shot I take is about choosing a moment that speaks to me, something worth remembering. It’s not about ownership. It’s a conversation, a connection with the person in front of my lens."

Maybe that’s why he prefers analog. "You have 36 shots. Every one has to matter," he says.

Yesterday, You Said Tomorrow

I ask him if he were to publish a book, what he would call it. He thinks for a moment before mumbling: Yesterday You Said Tomorrow.

"It’s past, present, and future all at once," he says. It’s a beautiful encapsulation. Because isn’t that just it? The anticipation, the endless becoming. It’s the artist’s paradox: wanting to create something now, but needing time to understand what it even is.

© Francesco Candido

Francesco’s work is suspended in that space between impulse and delay, between urgency and reflection. He talks about wanting to create a magazine—"a way to link people through information, photography, art, cinema"—because he hates how isolated everyone is now. "People are animals," he says. "We’re made to connect" and especially young artists, “people that struggle as I do, to have an audience.”

He tells me he’s getting in better shape—"in general, I guess"—and that it’s time to get serious. But ironically, the fulcrum of his work is still playfulness. "I don’t know myself so well," he admits. "Maybe my photography is about that."

The Shot That Got Away

"Do you have a shot you wish you’d taken but didn’t?" I ask.

"For sure," he says without hesitation. "There were so many times I didn’t have a camera—because it was broken, or stolen, or I couldn’t afford one. There were moments I had to ask to borrow one. I’ve missed so many shots. And I still think this: I could do more."

But maybe photography isn’t about having every shot. Maybe it’s about knowing which moments have to be captured, which ones demand to be held onto.

"If I could," he says, "I’d take 36 photos every week for the rest of my life. And then, years later, I’d reconnect the dots."

© Francesco Candido

So, in the end it’s not about collecting moments or cataloguing regrets - it’s about being lucky enough to understand them later, when they’ve had time to settle, when one can gaze with their inward eye and resist filling the gaps with fantasy.

When the interview ended, I thought: this may be the last one I ever do. I was reminded again that paying attention is a labor of love— the kind you need to have when you ask questions, when you listen, when you photograph somebody. There’s a whole city in Francesco’s lens, it mimics Rome in a way, like one of Calvino’s invisible cities between the shutter and the glass. He seems to me a kid, and I look at him with the cynicism of someone trying to make sense of it all.

Francesco’s photography isn’t just about capturing a moment, as he states; it’s about building a quiet but undeniable connection between the subject and the viewer, a momentary intimacy that mirrors the world’s larger, unspoken bonds. As he steps into filmmaking, I think his lens will undoubtedly continue searching for the raw, rust-stricken truths of human interaction, where vulnerability and sincerity hold us together, much like the narratives Sontag or Berger once spoke of—about seeing and being seen, but, with Francesco, always with the inherent, unguarded humanness that Linklater’s characters would recognize as their own.

That lack of self-conscious posturing is precisely why I’m drawn to young photographers—the unkempt romantics, the unruly postmodernists. I love talking to people who haven’t figured themselves out yet. I explored this in Amateurs: Navigating the Fine Line Between Inexperience and Creative Dreaming, and I keep returning to it.

There’s something so awe inspiring about people still finding their way, something so important about bearing witness to individuals who could still be anything—who, to borrow from the criminally underrated Treasure Planet, have "the makings of greatness" within them.

References / Further Reading

Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)