When you have little or nothing, living by the day or on a salary that often does not allow you to feed yourself and your family or pay the rent on a tin shack at the end of the month, you realize that the most precious commodity that still keeps you alive is water. And when you see that even water is no longer available to you but is paid for, then you realize that the society that exploits you, made up of men and women like you, goes to the extreme, shameless lengths of doing so, profiting from whatever need you have, to the extreme.
So it happens that in Nairobi, even in slums that are abysses of misery and exploitation, public water is not free. In Mathare, a ghetto where about six hundred thousand people live, its sale is contracted out to private individuals who resell it at a premium price according to the trends of the free market and the situation of the water network.

Milanese photographer Filippo Romano, who has been frequenting Kenya and in particular the Mathare slum for more than a decade, most notably with the project "Made in slum," presented at the Milan Triennale in 2013, has begun to photograph the slum with neorealist intent and unencumbered by the patina of neocolonialist or vetero-goodist pietism. His fascination with the adaptation exhibited by his communities ranges from nightlife and colorful motorcycles to watertanks as do-it-yourself infrastructure and garbage collectors in Dandora, Nairobi's main landfill. The "Watertanks" series, published in an unusual, hyperreal edition, collects years of photographs of these large plastic tanks, often mounted on concrete or metal distribution structures.

"I worked on elements that in the chaos of the ghetto's urban landscape are repeated as staples of a perpetually changing geography, and I created a catalog that is embodied in the pages of a school notebook that I always carried with me."
With this work, Romano was awarded third place in the important 2018 Kassel Dummy International Photographic Award. The "photo notebook," published in only 500 copies, is for sale online.
 

Born in 1968, Filippo Romano is a documentary and architectural photographer.
He graduated from I.S.I.A. in Urbino and specialized in documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York.
Romano's work focuses mainly on architecture and city dwellers. Since 1998 he has collaborated with the publisher Skira and his work has been published in international magazines. His work has been exhibited at the Canadian Center for Architecture C.C.A., the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, the San Paulo Art Museum in 2012, and at La Triennale di Milano in 2013.
He is a teacher at the NABA design school in Milan and at the master's program in photography at IUAV in Venice.