The Thing You Won’t Let Go Of

Sandro Giordano was cycling somewhere when he fell, and in the moment of impact he chose—apparently instinctively—to hold onto what he was carrying rather than break his fall with his hands. The collision damaged the function of his hand by thirty percent. He kept the thing he was holding.

The photo series he made from this experience is called _IN Extremis (corpi senza pentimento)—bodies without repentance. People mid-fall, faces about to hit the ground, hands still clutching phones or bags or cups. The objects are pristine. The bodies are sacrificed. Each image is composed with enough formal care that the violence registers as beauty first, which is sort of the point.

It circulated on Instagram in 2014 as a piece of anti-Instagram: messy human bodies in a space built for clean ones, shot with the same polish and precision as anything else in your feed. The irony was embedded in the platform choice. What Giordano is actually describing is older than smartphones—the way certain objects come to feel more worth protecting than the self that’s carrying them. You know this from the inside. The thing in your hand feels precious even as the ground comes up to meet your face.

What I keep thinking about is how well the image does its job at a glance. Two things are prioritized—the object and the composition—and the body pays for both. The humor and the horror arrive simultaneously. That compression is harder to pull off than it looks.