Corrado Benigni – författare

What do we see when we observe? What do we see when we observe a photograph? Ghirri's work is distinguished by the tension between the object and its representation, and there is nothing that he loves more than those situations in which boundaries become permeable; his work has taught us a new way of seeing, giving meaning to what is seemingly obvious. This is not the landscape that is normally perceived, but the one that is supposed to be latent, inscribed on the reverse: landscape of memory and fairytale, the landscape of hidden figures and wonders. In this direction, Ghirri has always preferred common and familiar places, already seen, but for the first time 'observed' with different eyes, where everything is suspended between past and future and where, like in the countryside, the world can be imagined as a vision which still arouses wonder. A thought-landscape. Text in English and Italian.

Giacomelli's landscape is both real and invented, just as his eye is both visionary and visual. It is a pretext to represent another situation. His landscapes are 'written landscapes' in which the horizon is almost completely eliminated: a fusion of time and non-time. In his landscapes, the relationship between countryside and memory, between Giacomelli and a denied and accepted mother earth, is more dramatic, resulting in a dry and great representation. He captured the marks, material and furrows of the earth and in them he found parallels with human bodies, since the earth, in his poetics, is the flesh of man. Text in English and Italian.

Reflections on the landscape are the fulcrum of Franco Fontana's poetic imagery, whose work has always been aimed at revealing the mystery of the invisible that is hidden within the visible.Photography is the tool Franco Fontana uses to capture the inexistent of what is real - always hanging in the balance between representation of reality and so-called reality.Fontana's work, therefore, represents an analysis of seeing, meant as an imaginative and cognitive activity: his intentions are not restricted to documenting the appearance of the places and people he captures, nor to the idea of image exclusively as an aesthetic object. On the contrary, he proposes some food for thought that (while taking reality into account) also contemplates the re-evaluation of perception through photography.Text in English and Italian.

Nino Migliori (1926) is the most authoritative and eclectic Italian artist in the field of experimental photography: an art he has been practicing uninterruptedly since 1948, when, in his early twenties, he approached the Circolo Fotografico of Bologna - the city he was born and has always lived in - going on to become almost immediately a professional. To this day he is considered one of the masters of contemporary photography. To a production close to the so-called Italian Neorealism, he always coupled a conceptual research within the most advanced side of the European Informal. The passion for reality and the thirst for new horizons allowed the photographer to offer us images that go beyond the news photographs and, as explained by the curator Corrado Benigni, have rather the strength of icons. Text in English and Italian.

The volume brings together for the first time the photographs taken by Olivo Barbieri (Carpi, Modena, 1954) in the early eighties. In these shots, full of mystery and everyday life, can be found all the elements that in the following decades the Emilian master would have developed: the artificial lighting in contemporary cities, views from above, home interiors and bars, the signs left by man in the landscape.In consonance with the spirit of research that characterised the season of Italian photography between the late seventies and the early eighties, Barbieri scoured with a sharp and meticulous gaze the hidden corners of the province – authentic places of the indefinite – with the intent to investigate the theme of visual perception and its representation. His images scratch the surface of a banal only apparently so and, in a state of expectation and disorientation, open up a new way of looking at space, instilling a doubt in the observer: do we actually see reality?The volume includes a critical text by Corrado Benigni and a conversation with the artist.Text in English and Italian.