Why a book on infertility?

This photographic project started two years ago and has evolved into a book with a specific goal, that of normalizing infertility, breaking down a taboo that makes us feel defective and unsuitable but above all alone. There is little discussion of infertility, the media rarely talks about it either on a medical-scientific level or on a social level. Yet it is a very widespread issue.

While frequenting the many waiting rooms, I looked for someone next to me to talk to about how you can feel transformed while spending time waiting for the good follicle. Soon I began to feel the inadequacy of being infertile, different, less feminine and not maternal. Guilt swirled in my head, _you wasted your time, you had too many partners, you are not complete and your moment has passed. You have worked too much and you can't have everything in life, you know._ These thoughts keep you company while you wait for anesthesia or a new exam. And in the meantime you deal with the fear of growing old alone, without ever having been called a mother.

Maybe it's time to put a spotlight on all of this and all these women on the journey to have a child. This book, made up of the faces and stories of 100 women, proves to be that beacon, a lighthouse that serves as emotional orientation and as a light to navigate.

with this precise aim, the lens of my camera became a means through which every woman could tell the intimacies of her own story. Women who, in sharing, stopped feeling ashamed and opened up with generosity and togetherness. At the same time it is also a great responsibility for me, since a single shot summarises a story, in many cases lasting years, that I tried to condense by capturing its essence. I joined these women in their cities, from Italy to England, creating sometimes improvised sets. I shot them in natural sunlight, at sunrise or sunset, in the wind, in the rain, in the heat. I made them climb, get in water fully dressed and sometimes take some risks. But they were there and they let themselves share with a thousand smiles and with their whole range of emotions.

"One of Many" is this, a great collective work and also motivation to raise one's head and smile, a motivation that passes through 100 portraits of courageous women who literally "put their face into it".

Each portrait is accompanied by an anecdote, a flash of a perhaps complex story, to cast a sensitive gaze on the world of infertility, which ranges from frustration to irony, from discouragement to hope. There are 99 portraits plus one - mine.