Davide Barbieri: Mad-riddle

There’s a peculiar extravagance in Madrid, something you won’t immediately notice. When you move here, you’ll first be overwhelmed by its brilliant light and its generous people. Then, you’ll likely get lost in a maze of quirky traditions and a seemingly grotesque taste for excess. After a while, you may even think that this is an obvious place, made to be uncovered, exposed, and experienced by everyone at their own pace.

However, just like any masterpiece worth its name, Madrid has a dark side – a secret life hidden in plain sight, that will soon lead you to question what you see. A smiling, polymorphic riddle, whose solutions lie in the contradictions, in the faint discordant voices lost in the racket. The unobvious in disguise, that can only be unveiled by finding the glitches in the architecture.

The images in this collection aim to convey part of this feeling of oddity through the light and the people who give life to the city. Wandering the streets of Madrid is often an experience of serendipity, of unexpected encounters, of rewiring the mind.

These photos were made in Madrid using cameras, and without the use of AI. About one-third are manual shots on film (2, 3, 6, 8, 13, 14, 19), just because old photographic equipment can be of great help in catching ghosts.