Corinne Isabelle Rinaldis
For Corinne Isabelle Rinaldis, photographs are more than documents, artworks, or products. They are channels, both for the people and places they capture and for a photographer’s self-awareness and receptivity to different environments. A born traveler who grew up between Northern Italy and Ticino, Switzerland, Corinne has been around the world taking photographs in her own conscientious and organic way since 2016. Her work has been featured by National Geographic, the British Journal of Photography, the Open Walls Photography Awards, and the Kolga Tbilisi Photo Awards in Georgia. She usually shoots with her simple and inconspicuous Canon PowerShot G5, but is considering branching out.
We reached Corinne in an off-grid wooden cabin in the Bernese Oberland area of the Swiss Alps, where she’s waiting out the pandemic by making music and experimenting with nighttime photos of the surrounding snowy forest.
It seems like you have quite an open-minded and meditative approach to photography. I’d love to hear how you started working that way.
I’d been working as a project manager and artist liaison at an art gallery for six years. I loved my job, but I really needed something new. I was taking a few photographs at that time, but it was never something central. So I quit my job and decided to just travel. For the first time in my life, I didn’t really know what would come next.
My lovely colleagues collected the money to give me a camera as a gift, so I felt like I had a bit of a responsibility to share my adventures with them. When I got out there and one place led to another, I started realizing how natural photography could be. The camera ended up being just another part of my body. Sometimes I wouldn’t pick it up for five days at a time, and other times it was a way of figuring out how to communicate with people, like playing a game with them. I was basically shooting on the settings the camera is on when you buy it. But I certainly had a passion for spending time with people and understanding, learning, and listening. That was the main thing and the camera was really just an accessory.
When I went back to Switzerland for a bit to recharge, I got some encouraging feedback on my photos. Also, people were like, “You know you’ve been photographing in JPEG?” So I found out how to shoot in RAW. I felt a bit of pressure when I went back out into the world, like I now had to take good photos. But it’s never really been about that. I was giving myself the gift of time and I had to let life lead me and give me what it was going to give me.
What’s your ideal way for people to interact with your photos?
Curation is a tricky thing. Every place and every situation is specific. For me, it’s not really about the success of my work but about figuring out how I protect what the photos themselves represent. These are people I met and never asked their permission to publish because I never intended to. I think these images of them could be put into a context with a very inaccurate or even wrong meaning.
Many people that I’ve photographed are part of cultures that are already endangered by the direction things are going in. They’re very affected by tourism. I wouldn’t want the photos I took in Mongolia, for instance, to end up in a tourism ad. In a way, I want them to do the opposite. That might sound harsh, but I think if you’re not going there as empty as you can and trying not to impose, then please don’t go. That doesn’t mean that I feel like I did it the right way. I’d like to be a little bit smarter about crafting good context in the future. I’m still trying to figure out what that would mean.
To answer your question, sometimes the right way might be an exhibition, sometimes a publication, but I also believe those things often only reach people who are already interested in them. Maybe the people who would profit most from recognizing our basic universal humanness despite slight cultural differences won’t see these things. So how do we reach them? Could we bring the images to them on the streets somehow? Or could we mix it in with TV advertising? Where can you put your work so that people can see it without having to be already interested in it?
Do you think much about how the technological revolution of smartphones and the social revolution of Instagram affect work like yours? I guess it would be hard not to…
I think that side of things is potentially genius. I remember 20 years ago when I first saw the reality TV show Big Brother, where they put people in a house together and film their interactions. I thought, “This is going to be so interesting.” But unfortunately, it wasn’t a sociologist, a psychologist, a philosopher, an artist, a physicist, and a mathematician. It was silly people who love talking about gossip. Not that everything has to be serious, but it’s a pity. It was always a dream of mine to put the most interesting people I could think of in a room and see what kind of incredible stuff came out of it.
Selfies are extremely courageous. (I’m personally allergic to sharing myself in that way.) I always appreciate a view of someone else. At the same time, they often reveal our natural self-centeredness and our failure to adapt. We’re self-centered by habit, and we can forget to change to fit the context that we’re in. Whether a selfie is taken in Mexico or Peru or Australia, often you can’t even see what’s in the background of the image. In that way, social media and the availability of photography are just tools that reveal something about us that already exists. It’s a visual representation of what’s happening anyway, which isn’t necessarily good or bad. But they’re powerful tools. I would like to profit more from them, I just want to do it in a way that’s smart and constructive.
I wanted to ask about a couple of your photos that I thought were particularly powerful. First, the two Indian boys jumping from the roof?
That one was published by the British Journal of Photography last year. I had seen images of these stepwells in Rajasthan that are used to collect water, and I was like, “I need to go there.” The place is called Panna Meena ka Kund. When I arrived, there were kids bathing in the water because it was like 40°C. I don’t know if you noticed that they’re jumping from a kind of crumbling ledge. Then it was just the luckiness of capturing that kid with his arms open like he’s flying. That’s not something you can plan. I was just there.
It’s not directly related, but immediately beforehand I visited a temple nearby and got kicked out for entering with shoes on. I’d only been in India for a few days and I was a bit scared that I’d done something really wrong. Then a younger guy came out and told me that I could come in, just without shoes. Inside, a slightly hunchbacked man who I learned was a Sadhu invited me to sit down in front of him and we just stared at each other for five full minutes. That was a huge release. I cried for the rest of the day – not in sadness but maybe in liberation. Then I went and photographed those kids with their open arms and their courage and freedom. I don’t know if the photo can contain my experience from just before, but if it can, I’m happy.
That’s incredible. I also wondered about the photo of the Cuban secretary.
Whenever I look at that photo, I’m always drawn to the painting on the wall of a scene that’s literally 200 meters away from there. I realized when I was photographing her that I could have been there 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, and while she would be younger, everything around her would have been exactly the same. That gives the image a real sense of time and space.
I was in Cuba with my father and it was like living with him in his time, which was when the country sort of got frozen in time. There are no plastic chocolate wrappers littered around. You have the old cars. I’m quite melancholic about having missed that part of history – maybe a little too melancholic. Sometimes I go to a place and have to fight with myself to stop seeing it as if it’s 10 years ago. After about three days, I usually get angry and then sad and the next day I can finally accept how it is.
How’s the cabin? What has it been like having to stay in one place?
It’s the first time I’ve taken a long break in four years. I’m enclosed in a hut in the forest up in the mountains. And because of coronavirus, I’m pretty sedentary. It’s an interesting moment because I have time to look at all the images I’ve amassed and ask, really for the first time, what I should do with them. How should I share them, if I share them at all? Because that was never the plan.
It’s as if I’ve written twenty diaries and now I’m trying to make a screenplay out of them. It’s not the amount of photos that’s daunting – it’s more that there are so many stories within them and there’s a responsibility of figuring out how to frame them. I realized that I’ve photographed wrestling in pretty much every country I’ve been to. There’s something about the rules of a fight that tells you a lot about a culture. So I was thinking about curating a project that looks at wrestling specifically. I’ve also filmed lullabies throughout my travels. To me, they’re the first cultural imprint on children. It’s a kind of storytelling that didn’t get as lost as others because it’s musical. I often asked people to sing their lullabies for me, especially in places where the language is getting lost. Now I have this treasure of a collection. But again, what’s the best context to share that in?
I must say, recently I’ve been spending more time making music than taking photos. I’ve never made music before. I just opened GarageBand for fun. I can’t play any instruments, so I do many vocal recordings on top of each other. But there is a lot going on here in nature. I saw a fox the other day and there are woodpeckers and squirrels. Photography is definitely the medium that allows you to just be there, out of the way. It goes to show that it’s not even really about traveling. Now I’m in a forest in the country where I live and I’m still practicing the attitudes I was cultivating out there in the world: to just shut up, and if I feel like doing something, to do it playfully.
On your Life Framer page, you write “I was born in a car running on the highway.” Can you explain that to me?
When my mom was pregnant with me, my family was living in Bergamo, Italy, but she wanted to have me in Switzerland. The legend is it was because of the breakfast and the hospitals, but the truth is she wanted the same doctor that delivered my siblings. When she knew I was coming, my parents packed the three kids in the car and my father started driving towards Switzerland.
At some point, my mom couldn’t wait anymore, so they stopped at a gas station on the autostrada. It was August 4th, so it was really hot and crowded, as you can imagine. Because my mom is a bit wild, she had brought scissors and rubbing alcohol, just in case. My father ran straight behind the gas station bar and took a whole jar of water. Two women apparently ended up helping my mom give birth to me in the front seat of our Alfa Romeo. There's probably something about being born on the road that sticks with me.