Books

A project that has received many awards:

• Winner of the InTarget Award and selected for an exhibition at the Photolux Festival, Lucca, Italy, 2024.
• Selected for the Lishui Photography Festival, Lishui, China, 2023.
• Winner of the Open Call and selected for The performing photobook exhibition, curated by Francesca Serravalle at the Format International Photography Festival, Derby, UK, 2023.
• Winner of the Open Call, juried by Paul D’Amato, and selected for the Back on the Shelf book exhibition, at Filter Photo, Chicago, USA, 2023.
• Winner of the International Open Submission and selected for the Photobook exhibition at the Belfast Photo Festival, Belfast, UK, 2022.

The title is: “A beautiful place”

To get to the heart of his story, Alessandro Mallamaci gives us two points of reference. The first is geographic: “The valley of the Sant’Agata river nestles in the red land of the Aspromonte mountains in the province of Reggio Calabria and flows towards the sea until it plunges into the Strait of Messina. The name of the waterway originates from the Greek aghatè, which is linked to concepts such as beauty, goodness and nobility; as if travellers from the Magna Graecia period had been enchanted by this place.” The second is sentimental, a kind of afterword to clarify the title of his work: “This is my landscape. I cannot help but love it. It is a beautiful place.” An unasked-for explanation which highlights, from the very first image, his deep bond, but also a conscious and painful one, for a beloved landscape.

Now the journey can begin. We are in Calabria, in the places where Mallamaci lives. Places which contrast sublime landscapes and building speculation, uncontaminated nature and nature corrupted by man and his stories, historic remains and industrial waste, popular traditions rich in charm and the rule of the ‘Ndrangheta. Contradictions, as he himself points out, are the leitmotiv of this area of Italy, and Mallamaci has been moving and working between these alternations for five years. He seeks the proper distance for his photography, one which allows a dialogue between details and wider visions, people and things, to build an itinerary which develops upwards and into which – almost a pause – horizontal visions are inserted.

(from the text by Giovanna Calvenzi)

Las imágenes de Giorgio Dellacasa, pertenecientes a la segunda generación de fotógrafos occidentales que arribó a la isla entre finales del siglo pasado y nuestros días –entre los que se encuentran Martin Parr y, sobre todo, Alex Webb– se inscriben plenamente en la denominada fotografía callejera, o eso podría parecer. Sin embargo, el condicional es obligado, ya que es preciso incluir ese instinto de viajero auténtico que mueve al ser humano a la comprensión y la inclusión, al tiempo que rehúye toda forma de depredación, incluida la depredación visual de la que a menudo está impregnada la fotografía callejera.
Así, en los breves textos autógrafos que acompañan el libro y lo transforman idealmente en una especie de cuaderno ilustrado y nos permiten adentrarnos en los entornos neurálgicos y periféricos de la capital de una manera no invasiva.Empezando por el título, en el que se habla de intercambio de miradas– se trata realmente de una conversación y no de un monólogo, con todos los matices que, aplicados a la gramática fotográfica, sugieren una conversación amistosa.

Las luces suaves o filtradas pulen los tonos e invitan a la intimidad; las amplias y nítidas zonas de sombra marcan quizá un silencio impenetrable, estableciendo un límite a nuestra presunción; la proximidad o distancia con los individuos, así como sus gestos, miden el espacio de interlocución y admiten distintos grados de confianza. Además, al estar presentes en varias imágenes, los encuadres semisubjetivos o «naturales», como los definía Luigi Ghirri, además de guiar la mirada, nuevamente actúan como elementos discursivos, ya que introducen breves pero agudos comentarios al diálogo.

En definitiva, Giorgio Dellacasa no habla de La Habana, habla con La Habana.

(desde la introducción de Laura Manione)

Photographs of well-composed objects, but with something odd, which makes them like surreal and extravagant toys. However, without any dramatic tension, without any disturbing atmosphere. Even the black and white seems subtle. And the composition is balanced, perfect, as only a master of still life, which Mario Cucchi undoubtedly is, can do. Even the title, C’est la vie, has something merry, but with a bitter hint.

(from the introduction by Gigliola Foschi)

The city that Giuliana Mariniello chooses to depict, in fact, is the one that the eyes perceive: characterized by scaffolding covered with tarpaulins decorated with advertising images or by reproductions of the hidden architectural structure; it is the space punctuated by billboards placed against the background of the buildings; it is public vehicles disguised with decals. Her photographic transcription of this environment, which we almost always perceive unconsciously and without committing ourselves to look in order to understand, is reinterpreted through a selective framing and with the judicious use of the Matisse tradition of  à plat, so as to radically transform the proxemic relationships between the things represented and to arouse new meanings, frequently full of irony.

(from the introduction by Massimo Mussini)

There are places where the past and the present meet and almost merge into a plot whose charm is hard to resist. The rain wets the car wind shield with small, boring drops, transforming it into a screen on which the images flow in black and white full of an ancient attraction. The photographer's gaze crosses it to linger on a landscape whose geometric rigour he captures: the bridge that defines the horizon has the imposing solemnity of a church facade but the image becomes dynamic in the lower part crossed diagonally as it is by the line of the parapet that runs along the Naviglio. Today the rare passers-by pay a distracted glance to that iron, those tie rods, those bolts. Yet these elements still retain the signs of an ancient civilization where iron represented modernity, the strength that knew how to resist the ravages of time, the challenge to the future, the same audacity that still characterizes the arches of the railway stations. Andrea Calestani approaches the Navigli with the curiosity of someone who has already experienced Milan in distant years but who is now rediscovering it when faced with places he had never visited.

(from the introduction by Roberto Mutti)

Susanne Martinet proposes an inexhaustible research work. The body, embodied, lived, discovers, feels, vibrates. For me it was an awakening, on the surface and in the bowels. It requires a constant presence, listening and willingness to meet, with oneself and with the other, be it an object, a material or a person.
The rigor that Susanne requires during her work allows access to a complex dimension, which holds limits and possibilities together, a practice of feeling, of knowing that needs its own time. It becomes research, which never ends, which holds different languages together, for this very reason it requires an awareness above all in detail.
One detail changes everything, Susanne tells us.
The photographs were taken during the summer internships and meetings; I, a student, felt the need to snap, to stop what I felt and lived with my body, with my whole being. They are images that attempt a balance between inside/outside, trying to connect the inside with the outside.
They have no intention of defining, of cataloging, but of opening up a possibility of reading, a point of view.
The idea of the project, born and shared in a choral dimension, evolved into a book. We felt the need to broaden our research: Susanne's work is Susanne herself, every detail tells about her and how every shape, object, movement of light is part of her sensitive gaze on the world, curious and open to amazement and how it is necessary to make it part of the narrative.
(from the introduction by Michela Liverani)

Juxtaposing elements from different realities was one of the cornerstones of the surrealist movement, which adopted Lautrément’s phrase – “the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” - as the manifesto of a new aesthetic based on disorientation and contradiction. By including remarkably incongruous objects in their works, these artists aimed to challenge our expectations, to free the mind from what it already knows and from automatic mental associations. Each of Fausto Meli’s photographs also contains an anomalous element; but in his case, it is neither particularly incongruous nor ostentatious. In fact, it is sometimes so unobtrusive as to be detectable only by paying close attention to the image. The unexpected elements in this artist’s works have a connection with what is shown in the photographs, (futuristic building, a castle on the sea, an old library, a volcanic island...); he creates encounters that have the power to generate new beauty, open up new meanings, new reflections...
(from the introduction by Gigliola Foschi)

The cutting of an image has an element of paradox: it forces us to come to terms with the materiality of somethng we instinctively deem intangible. John Mitchell, in his Pictorial Turn, dissolves this apparent contradiction when he distinguishes between images and pictures, arguing that "A picture appears on a material background or in a specific place. [...] An image never appears unless in a determined medium, but it also trasends media and can be transferred from one medium to another.".

It follows, therefore, that you do not make cuts in an image, but rather, a picture. But adjusting or touching a picture inevitably means generating new images and this is the precise area the work of Colomba D'Apolito explores, pushing and challenging limits and possibilities. This process of cutting and cropping that works on the support not because of an ant-modern stance, but because of an equally precise choice of field.
(from the critical text of Enrico Gullo, Art Historian and PdD in art history)

Pierre André Podbielski is a companion on this journey: travelling through museum corridors and across illuminated rooms where artworks are watching visitors, rather than being watched by them. They have watched the audience of art lovers that has kept me company for five years, an audience that I see again, with all its peculiarities, in Pierre André's photographs. However his photographic time, his aesthetic surprise inside the exhibition space has one thing that I do not. This is something that belongs
to real photographers, to men like Elliott Erwitt. Pierre André is an ironic, amused, suspended and detached, but sympathetic photographer. In his photographs, it is the smile that binds everything, holding the images together, telling their stories even better.

Photographic irony is an enviable gift, because photography is by its nature always balanced in a state of tension: it is always serious; the seriousness of the realities we experience, and it is always rhetorical. It is the way photography can stop time that makes it so solemn, its way of placing the moment the shot was aken at the centre of our gaze that makes photography a rhetorical moment, in the best sense of the word.
(from the introduction by Roberto Cotroneo)

The shaded area in which we hide away from ourselves is so large that it is impossible to even attempt to describe our identity. Those familiar with this shaded area know that to get beyond it you need to undertake a long, hard and at times painful journey down memory lane. Everybody has images from their past which, the more they reveal the profound essence of things and people, the more surprising they are; they clarify this grey area we all have to confront in a way which words cannot, but which photography can; they expose what we are and how we got there. Nonetheless, the past is not inert, and our journey is a game of mirrors where fragments of self awareness and memory, of love and lack of it, of reality and imagination become jumbled up, one moment familiar, the next unsettling. As if the moments we alone recall, and with which we order the months, days and years of our lives, are whimsical, a little bit here and a little bit there. Never diachronical but willy-nilly, typical of haphazard memory. Some return, reassuringly. Others take us who knows where, to elsewheres we have inhabited and lived. They are the pieces of an ever-changing puzzle which is our present, the difficulty is putting them together … later on. And so it is that memories change, just as we change, and they betray us, or, sometimes we betray them. We are wrapped around who we were in a spiral of explanation and interpretation of our world, which, on the last curve replenishes the memory we hold within: the yesterday where we come from. It enriches it, at times actually recreates it. […]

(Franco Carlisi)

[…] Even when we are faced with an unfinished work of art, the greatness of the authordefines it and makes it magnificent in itself: it is the Unfinished. In fact, it is preciselybecause it has not been concluded that the artist cloaks himself in legend and in a furtherstory that embellishes hisexistence since the immortality of his genius will always be tracedback to his mortal being. The genius is still among us-immortal-, but through thatincompleteness we remember that it was like us–mortal. But an unfinished work of art tellsus even more: it tells us about the creative process, the authorial gesture’s desire that wants toreach the essence, the genius’ vitality that struggles with the indolence of illness, the mysteryof a mind who does not notice the created beauty and abandons it, acontradictory era, like alleras, which establishes the canons but does not recognize the masterpieces. No unfinishedwork of art is minor, precisely because it is more open than a finished work of art. To fullyunderstand the wonder that such incompleteness causes, it is enough to dwell on thediscomfort that instead produces another type of unfinished works: infrastructural, building,urban ones. […]

Someone who is called Lenin must have a certain destiny. Strong is the imprinting, the connotation of the struggle of the peasants, the popular conscience, the great Communist dream dashed upon the rocks of Soviet dictatorship, but which in our Emilia part of the Po valley, has remained an unrealised utopia. Therefore, those who bear what is more of an honour than a burden may be understood if they dedicate their existence to the simple life of the fields, painted with the colours of the countryside, scented with the smell of hay and stables, framed by the sunsets when the grass changes colour. It is the work in the fields and the peace of nature that brings humans closer to poetry. The poetry of things and the soul, a language that feeds on the vibrations of the damp, fertile earth which at other times is also arid.[...]

The photographic gaze of Paolo Simonazzi perfectly captures the nature of the objects and brings them back to life in their essence made of pastel colours, creative chaos, fragments of a lived life. The opaque mirror which reflects the old typewriter, the brass lamp that hangs from a ceiling of warn beams, the old broken down Jaguar, almost an oxymoron in the proletarian context it is nestled in, the stable with its crooked doors opened out where the animals feed on light and freedom far from the dark mechanised farms, the bizarre clock with the image of Che Guevara on the handmade doily on the dresser, the pendulum on the wall and the old photo of a football team in black-and-white: this is the universe that lives again thanks to the sensitive exploring lens of Simonazzi, the world of objects that seem to stand guard with silent testimony over the peaceful passing of the seasons, when, after the winter, as Zucchero Fornaciari, another child of these lands, sings, the snowfields bloom. A small world, but with a great heart.

Luca Manfredi has walked the land and has seeded a memory of it’s people with his vision of Irish Pavee kids. Precocious and mysterious lads, they draw upon their inner strength to find a place within themselves where removal from a place does not create sorrow, but freedom. At ten years old with their own horse they are like complete adults. They sway in the meadows with a cerulean aura on their skin and excitement on their faces as if they were continuously singing. They are young, around eight, but for some inexplicable reason they carry on as though they were grown men. They have many siblings among their own kind, were raised without formal schooling, and are children of extended ‘families’ where their own language of signs and gestures are recognized without judgement.