Photography by: Alessandro Petriello
This is a story about daily life that takes place within domestic walls, a story of sacrifice, pain, hardship, but also about love. My grandmother was confined to her bed for many years due to a lengthy illness, and over the course of those years my mother was often next to her, out of choice but mainly out of love. These photographs are a chronicle of the last few months of my grandmother’s life, until the night she passed away, and they capture those moments which I thought were most meaningful.
As their days started to look more and more alike, so the two women somehow began to resemble each other. When pain caused my grandmother to lay sleepless at night, my mother often stayed awake to keep her company. When my grandmother was confined to her bed during the day, my mother, feeling tired from the night before, often went back to her own bed to get some rest.
I have decided to name this work „Two Women“ because I didn’t want it to be just about my mother and my grandmother, but rather, I wanted it be a portrait of the many people throughout the world who live each day the same experiences and the same moments that these two women have shared.
Alessandro Petriello is a Swiss-Italian photographer. He was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1986 and grew up in Italy. After finishing school, he moved to Switzerland, where he studied Visual Arts at the HSLU (Hochschule der Künste) in Lucerne. In 2013, he returned to Italy and joined the “Scuola Romana di Fotografia e Cinema” in Rome, where he studied Reportage and Documentary Photography. His works have been displayed both in Italy and abroad, and published on numerous platforms and online magazines.
