In Nicola Cappellari’s work, the photograph is never an endpoint. It does not resolve into certainty or narrative but remains suspended, waiting. His project Analogical Limbo inhabits this threshold, where the photographic act becomes less about representation than about suggestion, less about fixing the world in a frame than about leaving it open for interpretation.

A tree pressed against a wall, a cluster of flowers trembling at the edge of a field, laundry drifting in front of barred windows, the faint constellation of leaves floating on water — Nicola’s photographs draw our attention to what is usually overlooked. They are visual footnotes that ask to be read not for what they tell us but for what they allow us to imagine. In this sense, his photographs are closer to invitations than declarations, their meaning completed only when someone else enters them.

Trained in philosophy at the University of Padua and seasoned by more than twenty-five years in marketing and communication, Nicola carries into his practice a double awareness: of how images persuade and of how they fail. In stepping away from the compromises of commercial work, he embraced film photography as a way of reclaiming time. A time to wait, to imagine, to be unsettled. For Nicola, the delay inherent to the analogue process is not a technical inconvenience but a philosophical necessity. It creates a space where anticipation sharpens perception, where the act of seeing is infused with uncertainty, and where the photograph becomes an event of waiting.

Analogical Limbo does not construct a linear narrative. Instead, it unfolds as a series of fragments, each capable of standing on its own. A photograph of a road bending out of sight does not explain itself; it simply gestures toward distance and disappearance. A pair of swans gliding through a narrow canal is less a document of place than a fleeting allegory of passage. These images resist being tied down to singular interpretations, instead hovering in the indeterminate space between document and metaphor.

Nicola himself admits uncertainty: he knows what the project is not more than what it is. It is not a story of place, nor an exercise in technical virtuosity, nor a neatly packaged series. Rather, it is a field of possibility, where every image is provisional, every meaning contingent, every fragment alive with the potential to become a story through the gaze of another.

At the heart of Nicola’s practice lies a conviction that photography is a triadic relation: subject, photographer, and, crucially, the observer. It is only in this final encounter that the image becomes truly alive, transformed from a surface into a story. In this sense, he challenges dominant notions of photographic authorship. He refuses the position of the omniscient narrator, instead offering images that are deliberately incomplete, waiting for the observer to enter and co-create meaning.

This stance situates his work within what could be called the poetics of the document. It echoes a lineage of photographic practices concerned with ambiguity, incompleteness, and the fragment — not as weaknesses but as conditions of thought.

Nicola describes himself as searching for “traces of life where apparently there aren’t any.” This is perhaps the most accurate articulation of Analogical Limbo. His photographs do not seek grand narratives. Instead, they attend to the residual and the almost invisible. These traces, ephemeral yet persistent, become metaphors for resilience against indifference. What matters is not what the photograph shows but what it suggests, what it allows the observer to imagine beyond the frame.

It is from this position of openness that we begin our conversation with Nicola Cappellari. In dialogue, he reflects on the philosophical roots of his practice, the necessity of waiting, and the fragile life of images once they are released to the gaze of others.