Struggle and simplicity:
Paolo Pellegrin on finding the essence of a photograph

Italian photojournalist, Magnum Photos member and Canon Ambassador Paolo Pellegrin has spent decades covering conflicts and crises across the world, from Uganda and Bosnia to the Gaza Strip, Cambodia, Haiti and more. He's won worldwide admiration, including 10 World Press Photo Awards, but the photographic process is still a struggle, he reveals – with reality, the story, the subject, the context, and with himself.

In 2018, he was shooting on the streets of Tokyo and in the lesser-known Noto Peninsula with the then-new Canon EOS R System, following one of the guiding principles of street photography: "embracing whatever one encounters". Paolo spent 14-hour days prowling the streets in sweltering heat and shooting anything that caught his eye: people, reflections, layers.

"Street photography is the battleground for every photographer," he explains. "It's where you start making sense of the relationship between yourself, the world and the camera; and how to use this instrument to capture fragments of the real. I think if you're a good street photographer, you're a good photographer."

Now, he takes a different approach: one of subtraction. "There are many different things that you're grappling with," Paolo elaborates. In short, he removes the superfluous until he reaches "the essence" of the picture. "I think of photography as a little bit like a beautiful single gesture of a Japanese calligrapher. One brushstroke that contains everything." A luminous molten crevasse erupting from the dark volcanic landscape (see above), for example, or an otherwise imposing iceberg whose extremities appear to dissolve into the grey skies surrounding it (see third image).

In a profile in The New Yorker, writer Ben Taub observes Paolo as mottled light falls across the Namib desert in Southern Africa. "He went silent and lifted his camera, as expected, but in moments of intense concentration he looks like a different person. His eyes are still, his lips a little pursed. He moves deliberately, silently, his head scanning the scene – not smoothly but in sharp turns, like a raptor," Ben writes.

The elegant simplicity of the resulting image belies this process. "At times you become really possessed by that experience – hence, the physical transformation," says Paolo. "It's as if all your senses become heightened and aware, you continue shooting, and moving. You're trying to make sense of it."

For Paolo, photography is in the mind. "That's where I put all my main effort," he says. "I'm very interested in photographs which address something specific but also evoke something larger, universal or metaphoric." Paolo notes that a photograph achieves success only when it speaks on multiple levels, and "when it evokes the condition of being a refugee, the condition of being a wild animal".

In terms of technique and composition, Paolo tries to resolve what's in front of him in the simplest of ways. "There's a whole palette or gamut of options that photography offers which can help us to convey meaning, but I also feel that at times you run the risk of applying a formula to something," he says. "I'm quite sensitive to that idea, of not wanting to do that."

When natural light has been permissibly absent, he has worked with flashlights. "It works, but to use the analogy of sculpting, I'm at a stage where I just want to take away as much as I can to reach the core, the essence," he says. "Simplicity is really the ultimate goal, removing the superfluous." It's ultimately why he prefers the cloak of darkness.

Many of Paolo's images seem to rise out of the shadows. The border between the seen and unseen holds a particular fascination for him. Digital workflows and technologies offer something "quite extraordinary" – the possibility for exploring low light, or a near absence of light. "I have this idea that things are veiled, and you take them out of the darkness," he explains. "Whenever there is darkness, my photography is heightened."

Paolo suggests that perhaps his low-light aesthetic is a result of being dragged around churches as a boy with his architect father. On these visits, he learnt to appreciate the pared-down look of one, sometimes two sources of light, such as a backlight or a sidelight, creating shapes and forms.

Born in Rome in 1964, Paolo planned to become an architect but, in his third year of university, life took a different turn. "One day I had an epiphany and realised it wasn't what I wanted to do," he says. He quit his studies and his "life changed overnight" and he embraced it.

"The analogy I always made and still make was that of a foreign language: photography being this other language that you have to learn," he recalls. "You have to learn the grammar, the syntax, the words, and put them together. I really studied the vocabulary of photography through books and then going out, and shooting, and developing at night, and experimenting. It took at least a good eight to 10 years for me to feel that I had become proficient in this language."

But the process did not stop there, as it never truly ends, explains Paolo. "That's the beauty of photography. Our photographic vision will continue to change with our experiences, over time."

During his time in the industry, Paolo has seen photography undergo huge shifts with the advent of digital technology. "In the past, you had to have technical notions of how to expose film, or how to develop a negative, or how to print," he says. "Those were things you had to learn and master."

Today, by contrast, the photographic process is more accessible, but, according to Paolo, the mechanics haven't changed. "It's about an engagement, it's about time, it's about empathy," he says. "There's chemistry, personality, culture and everything somehow mysteriously distilled into photography, and into storytelling. The complexity of that process hasn't really changed."

Unlike other disciplines, photography progresses with modernisation, and the advance of digital technology – including Canon's award-winning EOS R System – has allowed contemporaries to explore a world that their photographic forefathers could not.

"It allows us to explore what was largely off limits, which is the darkness," says Paolo. "So you can choose ISO12,500, ISO24,000 or ISO56,000 and really unveil a world which before we could not enter."

Paolo's search for simplicity applies to his kit choices too. For many years, he chose prime lenses. "It was this idea of the pure lenses, and to use the Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's words, 'the dance of reality,' where you have to move and interact with the space and the subject," he says. "Moving is a process of thought, and for many years I was very into that. I have to say that the Canon RF 28-70mm F2L USM, though, is so extraordinary and so beautiful that it became my main lens."

Paolo's enthusiasm does not end with this particular zoom lens. In fact, he is an advocate of the EOS R System range in its entirety. "I'm a really big fan of the EOS R5 camera. It's just so right for me," he remarks. "It's the first time in a long time that I find files that really satisfy me. I really care about this tool more than other cameras in many, many years: the whole thing – the files, the ergonomics, the lenses."

There is an attribute beyond its spec sheet that he is keen for us to note. "Reliability is a virtue of its own. The fact that you have a tool that you can count on, always – that's a big deal," he says.

"Sometimes there are things, objects, a car, whatever, that you really feel corresponds to you, to your vision. I found it with this camera," he says.

In 2018, Paolo was the subject of an extensive retrospective in his hometown of Rome. Titled Un'Antologia, it brought together more than 150 photographs and previously unseen works reflecting the multifaceted themes that run through his work: encompassing stories from the evolving Antarctic landscape to conflict zones.

Paolo was last in a conflict zone in 2018 with the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV as his faithful companion. In Ukraine, it was the ability to shoot silently with the Canon EOS R5 that came into its own. "We always strive for invisibility, to be less present, to interfere less and less in a situation," he says. "Silent mode, I think in many circumstances, is really another game changer."

Whether it's accepting the challenge of celebrity portraits for The New York Times, F1 commissions or National Geographic expeditions, Paolo continues to push himself and his craft. The common thread through an eclectic portfolio is the shadow and texture that The New York Times Magazine director of photography, Kathy Ryan, describes as akin to "charcoal sketches".

Paolo's vision isn't what it once was. In his early thirties, he was diagnosed with glaucoma, a degenerative eye condition, which now encroaches on his peripheral vision. It's under control with treatment, but psychologically, its impact has been evident. "I don't have the best eyesight unfortunately, and autofocus, especially in low light, is very important for me," he reveals. "Even in the [shots] where it doesn't seem so... in these reflections, and these very soft moments, you still want to have that sharpness. There's the softness of the backlight, or the reflection, but also with the sharp focus behind it – the two need to coexist.

"I pushed myself pretty hard on my own, but it possibly pushed me even further. Less so now, maybe, but at the back of my mind there's this idea of finite time. I don't know until when I'll be able to photograph."

Fellow Magnum photographer Gilles Peress once told him that photographic vision was more than the result of intellect, "but also the organ – of 'how' you see". Paolo relates to this. He has a focus, intellectually and physiologically. Excluding the peripheral 'noise' in a composition, he highlights the necessary: what matters. Everything extraneous falls into the shadows.