About

My name is Nicola Polloni and I am based in Sicily. Although my official line of work is rather different from photography, since I teach medieval philosophy at the university, over time I came to feel that my philosophical explorations of premodern thought would remain incomplete without an enlargement of their scope. Hylonicum is the result of that extension: a way of continuing this inquiry into elusive yet inherent structures among things, humans, and events. In this sense, photography carries the same questions as my philosophical work into another mode of inquiry.

Hylonicum is both an experiment and a quest. What interests me is presence and absence: the way the ordinary arranges itself, rather than the extraordinary event. I am drawn less to isolated decisive moments than to situations, their accumulation, repetitions, and dissonances, and to the patterns they form when nobody is performing. It is in this way that photography continues my philosophical work, by pursuing what underlies, persists, and resists direct grasp.

Many of the series gathered here are structured as visual essays. If you are a casual visitor or a fellow explorer, I invite you to move slowly and notice interruptions and small failures of coherence. Light, the shaper of relations between bodies, surfaces, and distances, is the main subject of this experiment that I call Hylonicum. It gives extension and distinction to matter, revealing and concealing at once. And it is light that is reconstructed and revealed, again and again, by the structures it instantiates.

Far from being a commercial space or a display case, Hylonicum is more like a workshop and a notebook: a place for looking slowly, questioning what one sees, and occasionally losing one’s footing in the process. Yet it is also a project, and like any constructive project it is structurally open to collaboration.

COLLABORATIONS

I am always interested in working with people, understanding the ways they look at things, and exploring photography together. If you like the idea of shared walks, photographic exercises, portraits, documentary sequences, conversations around places, or small visual projects developed from a common question, do drop me a line.

I am also open to working with people who may wish to become subjects for portrait or documentary work. My interest is not in polished appearance or studio glamour. I am particularly fond of documentary work and portraits that do not depend on conventional beauty, staged expressiveness, or polished self-presentation, but allow character, situation, and meaning to emerge. Naturally, collaborators and subjects will receive the agreed photographs freely.

If you would like to explore a place, a practice, or a visual question together, do get in touch!

Image Use Policy

Copyright and Use

All photographs on this website are © Nicola Polloni. All rights reserved.

No image may be reproduced, distributed, published, altered, or used for editorial or commercial purposes without the author’s prior written permission. For licensing, permitted use, or collaboration enquiries, please get in touch via the contact page.

Street Photography Notice

Many of the photographs presented on this website are taken in public spaces and form part of an artistic and documentary practice. They are published for non-commercial, cultural, and artistic purposes. If you appear in an image and would prefer that it be removed, please contact me through the contact page. Requests will be considered promptly and respectfully.