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I Quaderni di Gente di Fotografia

I Quaderni di Gente di Fotografia

Quaderni di Gente di Fotografia is a sort of map to find one’s way in the Italian photographic world. Our Quaderni widen the horizons of photographic research by giving known and unknown talents the opportunity to come into the limelight. Being catalogues, they also aim at preserving the beauty of a project, which might otherwise fade after its exhibition. Thanks to Gente di Fotografia Edizioni’s distribution channels, our Quaderni reach specialised libraries and photography lovers. They also come at an affordable price, though offering the maximum editorial accuracy and quality. Quaderni di Gente di Fotografia are on the photographers’ side.

Andrea Calestani: El Navili

Andrea Calestani: El Navili

Author: Andrea Calestani
Texts: Roberto Mutti, Paolo Nizzola
Pages: 84
Languages: Italian/English
Year: 2023
Format: 210x160 mm
Binding: Stitched hardcover, white capitals, square spine

ISBN 978-88-906116-9-8

€ 28,00

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)

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Paolo Simonazzi: La casa di Lenin

Paolo Simonazzi: La casa di Lenin

Author: Paolo Simonazzi
Texts: Sandro Parmiggiani, Claudio Gavioli
Pages: 84
Languages: Italian/English
Year: 2021
Format: 16x20
Binding: Stitched paperback binding

ISBN 9788890611629

€ 20,00

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.

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Giuseppe Pagano: Giacometti

Giuseppe Pagano: Giacometti

Author: Giuseppe Pagano
Texts: Giovanna Gammarota
Pages: 96
Languages: Italian/German/English
Year: 2018
Format: 210x210 mm.
Binding: Stitch bound with headbang

ISBN 978-88-95388-33-5

€ 32,00

Giuseppe Pagano’s journey in the world of Alberto Giacometti commences with the small stones placed on the sculptor’s grave, in Stampa, at the local cemetery surrounded by the high rock faces of Val Bregaglia. From that moment on, and on several occasions, he keeps returning to this valley in pursuit of the evidence of a suspended transition: “I could feel that that place was calling me” – he said – “everywhere I looked I could see unequivocal signs, as though his presence were blocked in that place”. It is only through death that man is, in some way, freed. Death makes life solemn and so, as Berger says, “the essence of Giacometti’s work is the awareness of death”.

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Carlo Desideri: Napoli mare

Carlo Desideri: Napoli mare

Autor: Carlo Desideri
Texts: Antonella Cilento
Pages: 132
Languages: Italian/English
Year: 2017
Format: 200x200 mm.
Binding: Stitch bound with headbang

ISBN 978-88-95388-29-8

€ 18,00

If each narrative, as Algirdas J. Greimas states, has thresholds, then cities too have entrances, borders and contours. Naples has often been conquered from below, taking advantage of its ancient Greek aqueduct to enter the city; in fact Naples has an underground and conspicuous contour with no light, made of age-old, dark waters. For centuriesmits beauties have been approached by the sea, then inland journey being long and tiresome. And if the old heart of the city beats without the sun and sea, as in Caravaggio’s paintings and Anna Maria Ortese’s novels, its contours, even the most distant ones like those of the splendid Campi Flegrei, are rather flooded by light. \...\
Carlo Desideri has done a radiograph of its coasts and novelists, pursuing through his photographs those places which have been endlessly described by writers and voyagers.

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Fausto Meli: Effetto nottetempo

Fausto Meli: Effetto nottetempo

Author: Fausto Meli
Texts: Gigliola Foschi
Pages: 180
Languages: Italiano/Inglese
Format: 280 x 210 mm.
Binding: Stitch bound with headbang

ISBN 978-88-95388-27-4

€ 32,00

Nocturnal places like suggestions which surface from the darkness of a virtual canvas. Unusual dwellings and spaces in which the lunar, artificial light seems to blend with the wind to create new forms and original visions, in which the invisible becomes perceptible... or perhaps these are simply moods, amplified by the dark.

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Antonella Monzoni: Donne di Scanno Oggi

Antonella Monzoni: Donne di Scanno Oggi

Pages: 64
Texts: Giovanni Bucci, Amedeo Fusco e Antonella Monzoni
Author: Antonella Monzoni
Format: 220x170 mm.
Binding: Hardcover
Languages: Italian/English

ISBN 978-88-95388-28-1

€ 10,00

At the end of the 1950s Giuseppe Turroni criticized bitterly the photographs that Mario Giacomelli had taken at Scanno, defining them as “the quintessence of southern rhetoric”. If the great critic were still among us, he would certainly praise Antonella Monzoni’s portraits: “Scanno’s women have finally been photographed without rhetoric”. No more black skirts, but white coats to work in restaurants’ kitchens, pharmacies, confectionery labs, bakeries, shops… The new Scanno’s women draw cheques and settle invoices via the Internet with their own credit card. They no longer balance on her heads baskets full of wood to stoke the fireplace in view of a long cold winter with their shepherd husbands away in Puglia. Time changes everything and the artist – Antonella Monzoni in our case – often anticipates and bears witness to these changes.
Yet you can sense a certain continuity in the eyes of these “new” women, a connection with those photographed by Hilde Lotz-Bauer, Cartier-Bresson, Giacomelli and many more.

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Luisa Menazzi Moretti: Somewhere

Luisa Menazzi Moretti: Somewhere

Pages: 176
Texts: Valerio Dehò e Antonio Giusa
Author: Luisa Menazzi Moretti
Format: 165×225 mm.
Binding: Stitch bound with headbang
Languages: Italian/English

ISBN 978-88-95388-24-3

€ 20,00

There are books of photoraphy that speak to each one of us, with images that take us back to an emotion that, even thought we do not remember where or when, we feel we have experienced. These are pictures that show us something we have already seen; however, a new perspective, a different glance convey something we have already known as if it were the first time, the vey first time for something that we are already familiar with. SOMEWHERE of Luisa Menazzi Moretti is a photographic book that invites the reader to a poetic complicity with the author, in pursuance of a new value to what the author has set on the photographic paper.


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Carla Iacono: Fairy Glaze and other stories

Carla Iacono: Fairy Glaze and other stories

Pages: 84
Texts: Clelia Belgrado, Franco Carlisi, Carla Iacono
Author: Carla Iacono
Format: 165×205 mm.
Binding: Hardback, stitch bound with headbang, laminated soft touch
Release: 2015
Languages: Italian/English

ISBN 978-88-95388-23-6

€ 20,00

Carla Iacono, conceptual photographer, uses the portrait to investigate the moments of transition and explore the territories of the unconscious. It is an autobiographical path, born from the desire to underline the ongoing spreadingof a “non-culture” based on manipulation and negative models of which the teenagers seem to be the first victims.
The adolescents must learn to manage new stimuli and relate to the outside world in a new way; they feel the need to explore the new physicality, but in the meantime they experience nostalgia for their childhood and a sense of inadequacy for their changing body.
All this can cause fears and misunderstandings, starting self-defense mechanisms such as aggressivity, provocation or isolation.


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Enrico Nicolò: Photoblurrygraph

Enrico Nicolò: Photoblurrygraph

Pages: 112
Texts: Andrea Attardi, Franco Carlisi, Annarita Curcio, Manuela De Leonardis, Carlo Gallerati, Barbara Martusciello, Enrico Nicolò e Augusto Pieroni
Author: Enrico Nicolò
Format: 220×220 mm.
Binding: stitched paperback binding
Content: 51 analog colour photographs (fifty single frames of colour reversal films (slides) and one colour negative frame)
Release: 2015
Languages: Italian/English

ISBN 978-88-95388-22-9

€ 24,00

The book Photoblurrygraph presents 51 analogue colour photographs by Enrico Nicolò, progressively more out-of-focus images offering a sensorial, emotional, gradual visual journey going from misty sceneries to vanishing and abstract visions, obtained through an increasing loss of shape of the elements making up natural or scantily inhabited landscapes. This loss of shape is intentionally created “all in-camera”, that is, at the moment of shooting, and almost exclusively on colour reversal film (slides).
This aesthetic, narrative, “scientific” project is meant to help the observer reflect on the subjectivity of the way we see, on what we see, or better, on what we think we see. Such a systematic itinerary towards rarefied and shapeless visions implicitly represents for the author «a pathway to simplification, towards a transfigured essence. It is something that has to do with the purification of the eye, and the existential despoliation men experience throughout their lives. Through a contemplative, visionary – if not spiritual and mystical – journey. Towards light. Towards the Absolute. Where static contemplation is accompanied by dynamic progress».
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Giuliano Ferrari: Grand Tour

Giuliano Ferrari: Grand Tour

Pages: 164
Texts: Massimo Mussini
Author: Giuliano Ferrari
Format: 165×205 mm.
Binding: Hardback, stitch bound with headbang, laminated soft touch cover
Language: Italian/English

ISBN 978-88-95388-21-2

€ 24,00

When Luigi Ghirri was organizing the exhibition Viaggio in Italia (1984), Giuliano Ferrari was still at the very beginning of his professional career, but photography had been at the centre of his attention for some time already and he had certainly not missed the novel proposals in that collective exhibition. […] The decision to work on the topic of travel was not a casual one, because in the European culture, at least since the Renaissance period, travel in Italy was considered a way of getting to know the main cultural models: antique ruins, great Renaissance paintings and landscapes in general. Travelling was thus a way of getting to know, gaining this knowledge is not merely a question of seeing but requires a mental effort to make a critical observation in order to memorise, it stimulates any doubts we have on the cause and consequences of the things we see and leads us to compare our own experiences with our new knowledge.

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