....... Flavio Fastelli

...I was born in Fifties in a field house in Tuscany countryside.At that time, everybody was a poacher, in some way: we didn’t have money, but we always had game. I was ten when an older friend taught me how to capture wild animals with snares and traps, and sometimes he let me shoot. I really liked it, I felt a man and at the same time I could make some money.

…Then, years were going by, and I was loosing my fondness for hunting. I was 30 when I decided to dedicate myself to naturalistic photography. First I bought a Nikon FG20, motorized, with a Tamron zoom, a Metz 45ct zoom and with books, magazines and many attempts I started to photography animals.

… I started a new life. As I had some free time, I spent it following tracks and building small snares (now just to photograph animals, and not to hunt it) and putting them along a path, during the evening, next to my camera. After the night, I came and take back everything. Usually, it took many days to have a good photo! But it didn’t mind, it was still exiting.

…Life is full of unforeseen, and at a certain moment I changed job. I became a gamekeeper, so I had to retrieve my rifle and my gun license.

…Now I hunt for job and just when we are obliged because we have too many animals of some species, and we need to hunt them, respecting all the hunting laws. Naturally, when I am free, I dedicate myself to my real passion: the photographic hunting.

Many times people ask me how to be an haunter and, at the same time, a naturalistic photographer. I don’t have an easy answer, I can just express some personal thoughts.

… Hunting is a part of my job. When I work, I have to see the animals as dangerous things, that have to be eliminated. I never shoot for pleasure.

Photographic hunting is an hobby, that gives me satisfaction (sometimes I sold some pictures, but I spent the same money for colors film and battery!).

The research, the vision and the shot of that animal behaviors give me a human charge and put me in a mental state of relax that make my life more and more calm and serene.

… I am not a hunter’s supporter, and I am not an environmentalist, but fortunately they both exist. I am just afraid of fanatics: sometimes they are unconscious to be used for some personal business or to provoke damages on environment

…Except for the ones I use for fishing, I don’t use any other kind of living decoys for photographic hunting.

…I don’t watch documentaries on TV in which there are cruel scenes of animal hunting, as the ones in which the lion eats a still alive zebra, and they show its bowels on the screen. I understand it is a natural process; but I also think if they eliminated some frames, the documentary wouldn’t loose its strong effect on spectators. We perfectly know how nature can be cruel, it’s not always necessary to underline it.

…However, if we want to make a sensationalistic operation, why not to put the camera inside the WC? I am sure it could be, without any doubt, a "natural" experience, and surely without cruel scenes.'