home to junkies and tramps, are examples of this trend. In settings such as these Terrile and his pupils have portrayed a number of dressed up characters, creating an alienating semantic contrast. Terrile is also very active in teaching and dissemination. Since 2000 he has held yearly basic- and advanced-level photography courses, usually transferring to the advanced level some of the pupils of the basic courses. The advanced courses have therefore kept on accumulating new people, knowledge and experience – Terrile usually employs his pupils in his own professional activity – so that they represent nowadays a small but active community of amateur photographers in Genoa. In 2007 Terrile founded a non-profit society called Percorsi magici ("Magic paths"), devoted to the organisation of the courses, as well as of exhibitions, lectures, conferences and workshops. Terrile's teaching style is reported to be extremely informal and non-technical but highly practical. Nel segno dell'angelo Since his childhood, Terrile is admittedly fascinated by magic, exoterism and, in general, what is not visible – a very peculiar attitude for a photographer. This is, in general, the main drive to his somehow somber, hyper-contrasted black-and-white style, mostly realised on film and in large format (e.g., with old-style Hasselblad cameras). It is during a particularly hard time spent in Paris in 1993, namely in a bar while drinking, that he fully realises the importance of time in photography. Using a very fast time (1/500th of a second) he enforces a logical paradox: to photograph what cannot be photographed, an instant which the human eye cannot fully appreciate. This is the theoretical basis of his work-in-progress Nel segno dell'angelo ("In the sign of the angel"), a series of highly stylised portraits of people framed in the act of jumping. Terrile's angels are common men and women, alone, in couples or in groups. They can be surrounded by a threatening, dark sky or placed in a relaxed garden-like atmosphere. Stark contrast is usually employed to generate a sort of aura around the subject. The act of jumping is framed exactly at that peculiar moment when vertical velocity is nil, leaving the spectator with the illusion of a still frame, an impossible pose. (As a matter of fact, Terrile's angels look at first sight as carefully contrived photomontage.) Terrile's angels admittedly echo the imaginative world of Wim Wenders's Wings of desire ("Der Himmel über Berlin", 1987), in turn inspired by