Formerly a film editor from Milan, Italy, Fran Dileo is now based in Barcelona but seriously thinking of moving to Israel. He uses photography as a personal way to collect moments that in other ways would disappear without trace, searching for peace and beauty sometimes placed in the brutality of life. His haunting images of love and sex – most of the time taken in the same place – depict portraits of lovers as well as homeless people exposing the naked truth of “all those beautiful boys, pimps and queens and criminal queers, tattoos of ships and tattoos of tears.”
And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.
Primitive tribes were certainly convinced that the spirit, having escaped from the body at death, retained a replica of its earthly tenement. They therefore used tattoo marks as a means of identification in the next world and a passport to future happiness.
Images: © Fran Dileo
Quote No1: From Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1819 – 1891)
Quote No2: Ronald Scutt from Art, Sex and Symbol, 1974
