With two decades’ experience as a Reuters cameraman and visual journalist, Antonio Denti says he found the transition to using his phone as a camera jarring. “I was brought up in the analogue days and was quite hostile to the idea. I’ve been in St Peter’s Square twice when the white smoke announced the election of a new pope. I covered the 2004 tsunami, conflict in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Gaza. It was my job to report to those back home who could not see for themselves. Now phones can do that, and often they are held by people in the right place, at a more powerful time, long before I get there.”
Over time, however, he embraced this new opportunity to capture life, particularly with his family. He took this photo when visiting his parents, who live in Sicily. “It is a very special stretch of coast because Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, hovers over it like a spirit. The coast is stark and black, made of sharp rocks in tormented shapes. In the second world war, Germans used this area as a military outpost, but for me it’s where I grew up, where I learned to both love and fear the sea.”
His son, Marti, on the left, and two of his cousins are pictured after a day in the water, diving and snorkelling, “alternating between fear and courage”, Denti says. He doesn’t mind that the boys are looking at phones, given their long day in the sea and witnessing the dramatic nightfall a little earlier. “I always wanted Marti to develop a strong tie with that land and that sea. And it worked. He loves it as I do.”
