Born in Florence in 1976, Gianluca Panella, is a photographer who has recently been based in Jerusalem. In the course of this interview, he tells us about his journey towards a photojournalism that can fully integrate the author’s vision in rendering information. He also details the ideas and methods behind the creation of his “Gaza Blackout” series, which won the third prize at World Press Photo 2014 contest in the General News category. The edited conversation that follows took place in April 2014.

Q: Gianluca, how did you get started with your photography?
A: In Florence, I met my dear friend Jason who was attending New York University. He had come to Italy to prepare exams of art history and the history of photography to complete his studies. I was intrigued by his gear, a Nikon FM2 and a Leica M6. He explained the speed/f-stop concept to me. A whole new world opened to me! Just before leaving for vacation in the Netherlands, he suggested I take his Nikon along to practice and see whether I liked it: of course I accepted! During that trip I just picked up some images of street photography and, once back, we looked together at the pictures and he finally decided to give me his camera. With that FM2 I worked my whole first year of news reporting and doing real work. This was my beginning in the early 2000s.

Q: So you decided to leave everything you had undertaken up to that time, like jurisprudence, and fully immerse yourself in photography, in a new adventure.
A: Absolutely, yes. Actually, I was already a bit of a stray often embarking as a sailor on sailboats, so sometimes I did not attend classes for three or four months. Sailing was my main passion and I got paid very well. At the time I was twenty and everything was perfect that way! So, you can say that I had already started destroying my university career even before embarking on this journey! However, in photography, I’ve found a sense of responsibility that was missing in my other passions.

Q: This takes me to my next question. How do you choose your subjects/destinations and especially the point of view from which you will treat them? Is it you proposing reports to the newspapers or do you mostly leave already funded on a mission?
A: Until two years ago, I was enrolled by a small but very well-known Italian agency. More than a true agency, it is the office of a famous photographer who has a lot of work and therefore needs a staff to go along with it. For five years I worked for him, so for five years I worked only on commission. That’s how I also went to Lebanon, Haiti. However, his field was not the social and engaged photography. He is much better known for a national, popular and commercial imaging, very oriented to sales.
What I missed most then was to be able to express my own photography. During that time, I always had to do what papers wanted and how they wanted them. It was, however, a great school that allowed me to understand how a job should be done according to its purpose and destination. In a way, I became all possible photographers. At some point in my career, though, I had the feeling that all this was just an exercise in style and that until I managed to find my own way, I could never sign a photograph. In addition, I felt that most people no longer treated me as a young photographer. I had no more room to stand still experimenting. It was therefore time to take my own shape, figure out who I was as a photographer. Even though I had always photographed in someone’s shadow, I always believed in this work and, as soon as I started my own career, I immediately joined the Order of Journalists.
Thus, from 2011 on, I had to undergo what I call today “a violent action” in order to kill the old photographer and allow the new one to come out. Since then, I started going to festivals, conferences, roundtables attended by intellectuals, people who intend photography in all its thickness, and not just something to sell as in my previous environment.
It was what I needed, allowing me to get courage and finally write a letter to Alessia Glaviano, photo-editor of Vogue Italia, where I laid bare, even showing my weaknesses. Contacting those papers with whom I had worked for years within the agency, I realized that nobody knew me as a photographer. Often the photographs came out with only the name of the agency, while the photographer was not always mentioned. So it was like I had done nothing for five or six years and that was the hard part of the experience. Alessia Glaviano replied, we started corresponding ​​by email, until we met in her newsroom in Milan. Alessia put me in a position to walk alone on a path that no one knew, neither she nor I, but that turned out to be my own one.

Q: So, what about this new path?
A: About two years have passed since then, when I started working without thinking about sales. I focused instead on looking for my photographic language. So, beginning in April 2013, I lived for several months in Jerusalem, spending a lot of time in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, setting up a long-term project on Palestinian resistance fighters, focusing on their home life and family, trying to figure out who’s behind the hood, those called terrorists in the Western world. During the war of November 2013, which lasted six days, there was in Gaza the funeral of commander Al-Jabari, who was killed by an Israeli drone. There was a fighter there, with a MG machine gun, one of those gigantic machine guns, and with bullet ribbons around his neck. I went over to shoot one of those images seen a thousand times in the newspapers. I was right in front of him, when I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring. I realized, “If you wear a ring, it means you are a husband, perhaps a father, a son…” All this made me reflect a lot. I asked myself, “What would happen if someone occupied Italy? Perhaps, being a fighter is not a natural condition, but a social status in which you grow up… And then maybe I or the lawyer in front of my house could one day become fighters, depending on what happens.”
Obviously, I do not carry on only one project at a time. I rather try to look at stuff other than the main project because that way I often get more ideas, and that’s how I made the “Gaza Blackout” series.

Q: Tell us how “Gaza Blackout” was born?
A: It was just a few days before Christmas and I had not shot a lot of photos for the project on Palestinian fighters that I was following as early as April because, in the meantime, Gaza was having major problems due to bad weather. The whole drainage system had collapsed, blackouts reached their maximum duration – more than twenty hours – the cost of fuel from three shekels per liter rose to eight (the tunnels in Rafah, after the fall of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have been closed, then all the material previously supplied from Egypt came no more). So, in a few months, the situation has collapsed.
Of course I was interested in telling this story, but crowds of photographers were present and were taking pictures of the dark, of the sewers. All the big agencies – AP, Reuters, AFP – had plenty of photos of the blackout. Just imagine one of the most densely-populated places in the world in total darkness. The Gaza Strip has one of the highest-density populations in the world; it was like a surreal situation.
I considered what was happening very important, but the story was already inflated and, frankly, the photos that were coming out did not satisfy me. I’m not saying I’m better, I only say that if I were the photographer of, let’s say Reuters, I would have taken those same photos, those that can be sold to tell the story of the blackout.

Q: How did you go ahead then?
A: No newspaper would publish my photos of the blackout if they had not won a prize now, because in a newspaper or in a magazine without excellent printing methods you’ll only get black spots. Everything would get messed up. It’s obvious, therefore, that the typical photo of the dark in Gaza is of another kind for publishing, and not what I wanted to do because, as I just explained, I had decided to leave that path.
I then began to shoot at night with Aysar, the fixer who I work with when I am in Gaza, and who has become a friend. I shot with a tripod, although I am not a landscape photographer. The photographs are shot with a technique that is a bit peculiar.
Q: Which one?
A: When you’re just passionate about photography, you often read photo magazines. Now it seems ages ago but in one of those magazines I saw some landscape pictures which were completely surreal. The photographer who shot them ​​was taking night shots with extremely long exposures, sometimes up to five hours, while giving “points of light” on the landscape in front of him so that the light projected in the different areas of the frame will remain impressed on film. Of that photographer, I remember these few admirable pictures and then it disappeared from my memory for ten years.
Wandering in Gaza, I asked myself, “How do I make it clear how much dark is it?” Not that it’s dark – because we are all saying it is dark – but how much dark it is, how much uncomfortable and limiting this darkness is… At the time I thought that perhaps the only way would be to take an unreadable picture, a really black picture, so that the public cannot find the image.
Because those images of Gaza in the dark that circulated in the press were rather the backlight of Gaza, the silhouettes of Gaza… but when it’s dark in Gaza, it’s dark. You can see nothing in front of you in order to walk, unless a car or a person with the light of the phone steps in. Of course, those pictures were fine to describe what was happening in Gaza, but not enough for me to let you understand how far the discomfort went. In order to make you perceive the discomfort when you stand in front of a wall, for printed pictures, or in front of a monitor, I wondered then if I had to make you feel uncomfortable, by originating a visual discomfort while looking at the picture. 
However, choosing not to allow you to see this picture did not seem like a winning choice. Then I imagined a diptych: a very intense and very dark, underexposed portrait, coupled with a black picture of what was supposed to be a landscape. But even this solution did not convince me completely.
Walking at night, trying long exposures on a tripod. On one hand, I wanted to get very underexposed pictures so that the landscapes appeared almost totally dark, but I also meant to show the presence of man, because, as I said, Gaza is one of the most populous places on Earth. Therefore I needed images which were quite dark, but with a point of light to show that the darkness is not caused by a place that is deserted. It was then that those images seen ten years before in the photo magazine came back to mind. I own a very strong torch, good to light up in deep that I use to do certain types of work: then I used it to slightly brush the corners of buildings and roads in the Gaza districts, during 32 seconds of exposure.
Q: Is this true for all the images in the series?
A: In all but one. The photograph where at the center of the frame there is a red light and some people on the right, seen through the door. That’s a barber’s shop; the customers are waiting, at 7 p.m. In that picture, there is no intervention of mine. In all other pictures I brushed some areas in the frame with this torch. During 32 seconds of exposure – the longest exposure allowed by the M9 – I was going to illuminate, for example, five seconds that building, four seconds that bush, two seconds that pile of earth etc., depending on the color of the object and their type of light reflection. 
Only by rubbing very gently the beam of light on the surface of choice, you can get this effect, while if you simply point to it for a number of seconds and then turn the light off, only bright spots will appear.
Those were very cold nights, where we spent a lot of time explaining what we were doing. In Gaza, at four in the morning, with five degrees and the flood, no one would ever have been walking around with a tripod! We worked for about one week, sometimes the sky was not good. Once we got out to take pictures because the sky was very clear and starry, another time, however, the clouds were passing very fast in the sky due to the wind. Otherwise, the work would have been a bit dull and poor.
I strongly believe that the future of photojournalism resides more and more in telling someone’s own vision of the news and this series, I think, is the best proof of that, since it is a story so much told and ordinary because the blackouts in Gaza are very frequent.

Q: Given the crisis of press, where could this series land, in your opinion?
A: A high-quality magazine can certainly publish it: even in the darkest areas, the picture is very rich in detail, therefore extremely interesting to read. That said, I would love to have an exhibit, well-printed in large format on the right support. I’m confident these pictures can be extremely engaging.
Q: Therefore, can we say that the works you develop today are aiming more towards “author photography” rather than having them published in a magazine’s few pages?
A: Put that way, it would sound rather pretentious. My orientation is towards deepening the contents, and that could need a particular aesthetic treatment. The news can be conceptualized, moving a bit away from the mere documentation of the case. I argue that aesthetics can be a powerful means to convey a message. But my work remains strictly linked to the news; that’s where I come from, that’s where I have done my apprenticeship. I won’t ever get away from that world that formed me and to which I remain tied up. Moreover, I believe that our profession has great tradition. I practice photography as photojournalism, which means information, with all the variations that can be involved. The latest World Press Photo has just awarded a different kind of photojournalism,  but never straying too far from what our job should be, to describe a situation, a war, whatever they are.

Q: What equipment did you use for this series, and how do you think it helped you to achieve it?
A: This series of images was taken with a Leica M9, a Summicron 35 mm lens and a tripod. I must say that I am not a proponent of camera equipment at all costs. In my opinion, a great photographer can create an excellent job even with a mobile phone or through a pinhole camera. That said, first I tried to work with a Canon SLR that I frequently use as a system camera. However, I quickly realized that with long exposures, the shadow areas of the frame were rather crushed, and this was particularly problematic for a work in which blacks were central to the idea that I wanted to convey. Thus, compared to the CMOS sensor, the Leica CCD has proved very decisive at low ISO, in terms of intensity of blacks and depth of colorimetry. Not to mention the excellence of the files it produced.
Thank you for your time, Gianluca!
– Leica Internet Team
Learn more about Gianluca on his website. Read the interview in its original Italian here.