There is something honest about black and white. No warmth borrowed from a golden hour, no colour to flatter or distract. Just light, and the absence of it. Just what was there.

I started this project in late 2022 when I needed somewhere to look. And so I looked through a lens. Through the small rectangle of an iPhone, ordinary things became worth noticing: a shadow stretched across unfamiliar pavement, a window holding the last of an afternoon, a stranger mid-thought in a city I was passing through. I kept going because beauty kept showing up, even when I wasn’t sure it would.

I had spent years behind professional cameras. I knew the weight of the equipment, the ritual of the settings, the particular authority of a full-frame sensor. And then I put it all down. One device, always with me. No excuses, no hiding behind gear. The iPhone became a discipline, a way of learning that the eye matters more than the instrument.

Now I’ve picked a camera up again: a small Fujifilm, light enough to carry everywhere, quiet enough to forget it’s there. It isn’t a return to the gear. It’s what the discipline left me with. Whatever is in my hand, the rule hasn’t changed: if something is worth seeing, see it with what you have.

The project has followed me. Across cities, across countries, across the particular quiet of places you’re living in but haven’t yet learned to call home. Every frame is proof that I was present; that I was there, and I saw something, and it was enough.

Nero is Italian for black. It’s the language I grew up in, and it’s what’s left when you take everything else away.

I am Lorenzo. I build things: interfaces, systems, websites. I also take photographs. I have come to believe these are not different impulses.

Black and white is not an absence of colour. It is a choice about what to keep.