Walter Guadagnini – författare

The perfect primer on renowned Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia. Born in Palermo, Letizia Battaglia (1935–2022) took up journalism as a single mother, but discovered that it was easier to sell articles if she could also supply photographs. She became a news photographer for L’Ora, a Sicilian daily newspaper that took a stand against the Mafia and its political and economic connections. Between 1976 and 1991, she was a witness to some of the bloodiest events in Italian history, including the killing of judges, police officers and politicians. While these images brought her international recognition, she strongly opposed the label of ‘Mafia photographer’ and believed that her aim was to seek out life. She built up a many-sided portrait of her Sicilian homeland, developing a special sensitivity to women, girls and young children, and a deep empathy with those living in poverty. Her work stands as proof that both joy and suffering are part of the experience of being in the world.

'Paparazzi' is a photographic and cultural phenomenon born during the years in which Rome was considered 'Hollywood on the Tiber River'. The 120 images portray the features of the protagonists of that season - especially the divas and stars of the silver screen, in addition to the photographs illustrating the wild nights in Via Veneto between the 1950s and 1960s. Photos by Tazio Secchiaroli, Marcello Geppetti, Elio Sorci, Ron Galella and many other prominent figures of the time make up (together with pages out of the magazines in which they were published) a fresco of popular communication from back then. Once the heroic season of paparazzi came to an end, that language became a sort of code used in different artistic and commercial contexts, as demonstrated in the final part of the volume by the images of the leading names in today's photography scene such as Alison Jackson, Armin Linke and Ellen von Unwerth. Text in English and Italian.

Man Ray, surrealist master and exponent of the Dada movement, managed to reinvent not only the photographic language, but also the representation of the body and face,as well as the genres of the nude and the portrait themselves.Thisbook brings together around 200 photographs produced from the 1920s right up to his death in 1976, all featuring female subjects.Through rayographs, solarisations and double exposures, the female body undergoes a continual metamorphosis of forms and meanings, becoming an abstract form, an object of seduction, classical memory or realistic portrait, in endless playful and refined variations. Among the protagonists of his shots are Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott, Dora Maar andJuliet, a lifelong companion, to whom is dedicated the amazing The Fifty Faces of Julietportfolio (1943-1944). But these women were, in turn, great artists: asevidence is presented here a corpus of works dating back to the time - between the 1930s and '40s - of their most direct association with Man Ray and with the environment of the Dada avant-garde and Parisian surrealism.This volume offers a wide survey of one of the most exuberant periods of the 20th century, with authentic masterpieces of photographic art such as the Electricité portfolios (1931) and the very rare Les mannequins. Résurrection des mannequins (1938).Text in English and Italian.

Photographer of excellence, and among the most appreciated in the contemporary art scene, the Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf (1959) is to be considered one of the greatest interpreters of modern portrait photography: he is known all over the world for a photographic style dominated by mysterious and contemplativeatmospheres, for his mise en scène and theatrical compositions.Inhis shots Olaf weaves complex and dramatic narratives. His works are striking in their strangeness, their will to provoke, their sense of solitude and restlessness: they catch glimpses of truth, which reveal the imperfection and the fictitious nature of an apparently perfect world.This rich catalogue represents a journey through the artist's entire production, offering a complete overview of his work: from the beginning with Chessmen, the series that made him internationally famous, awarded at the Young European Photographer competition in 1988, up to the recent Palm Springs project (2018). The volume includes a critical text by Walter Guadagnini and a conversation with the artist.Text in English and Italian.

The first extensive monograph dedicated to the work of Paolo Ventura (Milan, 1968). Ventura has established himself in the field of artistic photography, offering a singular and absolutely original interpretation of staged photography, an art form in which photography is the final product of a creative process which, in his case, involves the preparation of scenarios and mannequins: the latter, together with real characters among which the artist himself often appears, are the protagonists of his stories. In these three-dimensional settings Ventura recreates, and then fixes through photography, a mental space that refers to the atmosphere of “magical realism” and to the fairytale flavour of childhood, generating a deliberately surreal contrast with the depth of some topics involved (such as war, abandonment, memory, identity).The volume offers an overall look at the artist’s 15 years of activity, showcasing 21 series from 2005 to the present time, highlighting the evolution of his language which, in addition to photography, is also expressed through drawings.The monograph includes critical texts by Walter Guadagnini and Francine Prose, an interview with Ventura by Monica Poggi and biographical notes.Text in English and Italian.

Miguel Rio Branco was a freelance photographer and director of photography for movies when he embarked on documentary photography, and was soon noticed for the dramatic quality of his colour work. In 1980 he became an associate of Magnum Photos. Fascinated by places of strong contrast, the power of tropical colours and light, he made Brazil his main area of exploration. This volume includes a special introductory text by Germano Celant and a critical intervention by Walter Guadagnini.“The work of Miguel Rio Branco is shaped by his need for the magic of the image, which is the result of a moment of grace and naturalness in the human condition. Through his images, he seeks a solution that offers a continuity between life and photography. Indeed, in his photographs, the passions of life are not subjected to any purifying cleansing, but offer the observer the outward fabric of life captured from its dark side, where all the conflicts of a human and non-human reality end up. Every form surges into this reality and is reduced to debris, but also to primitive and pure energy.”— Germano CelantText in English and Italian.

This volume is dedicated to the phenomenon of staged photography, the trend that has revolutionised the photographic language since the 1980s.Through over 100 works, the catalogue tells how photography was able to reach the heights of fantasy and invention between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st-century, previously almost exclusively entrusted to cinema and painting.Goldfish invading bedrooms, icefalls in the desert, imaginary cities, Marilyn Monroe and Lady D shopping together: all of this can happen thanks to veritable stages set up in order to build a parallel reality, or thanks to new technologies and, in particular, through the increasingly sophisticated use of Photoshop, released in 1990.Photography, the realm of documentation and (presumed) objectivity becomes the realm of fantasy, invention and subjectivity, completing the last decisive evolution of its history.Works by: Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, James Casebere, Sandy Skoglund, Yasumasa Morimura, Laurie Simmons, David Lachapelle, Bernard Faucon, Eileen Cowin, Bruce Charlesworth, David Levinthal, Paolo Ventura, Lori Nix, Miwa Yanagi, Alison Jackson, Julia Fullerton Batten, Jung Yeondoo, Jiang Pengyi.Text in English and Italian.

This book covers the last 20 years of artistic research by one of the leading contemporary Italian photographers: Walter Niedermayr. Through the recurring themes of his work such as Alpine landscapes, architecture and the relationship between public and private spaces, the artist’s interest in investigating places not only from a geographical but also from a social point of view is highlighted.Although in continuity with the legacy of the Italian photographic tradition, which views the landscape as the key to interpreting society, Niedermayr’s visual research is significant in terms of its ability to reinterpret this subject and renew it from both a conceptual and a formal point of view. For the South Tyrolean photographer, physical space today cannot be approached with an exclusively documentary intention, but as the pivot of a transformative relationship between ecology, architecture and society.In some of the works in the Alpine Landschaften (Alpine Landscapes) series, for example, the presence of man in the depiction of the landscape is interpreted as a parameter for measuring the proportions of Alpine panoramas, and at the same time as a political yardstick for his intervention in the metamorphosis of the natural equilibrium. This topic is also underlined in works such as Portraits, where the snow cannons filmed during the summer season – and thus inactive – become ambiguous presences residing in the landscape.Text in English and Italian.

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus The artistic direction of the festival – Tim Clark and Walter Guadagnini – maintains the poetic vocation of last year, taking inspiration for the theme of the 2022 edition from a phrase by the great French writer Albert Camus. At a time of great upheaval, a moment of transition and growth that follows numerous extraordinary hardships and crises that have now come to define our era, Camus’s maxim gives us food for thought about the inner forces that drive us as individuals in what we do, in every moment of our lives. A principle that intends to shed light on another facet of human nature; the ability to push back against adversities, to not submit to momentary complications, and of course, courage, without neglecting to mention the ability to persist. The translation of these thematics into the language of photography, and, by natural extension, visual culture at large, focuses on the notion of resistance as well as the different potential reactions to the onset of a new reality.Texts by: Walter Guadagnini, Joan Fontcuberta, Jitka Hanzlovà, Majoli, Mortarotti, Luis Cobelo, Fratelli Henkin, Anna SzkodaText in English and Italian.

The second volume in the Skira “Photography” series serving as a major reference in the field. The 50 years of artistic and mass photography taken into consideration in this volume are unquestionably the most important in the twentieth century. The acceleration of technological progress, the advent of the era of the machine and the metropolis, the epoch-making economic crisis, the dramatic aftermath of the collapse of the old nineteenth-century order in Europe with political upheavals, wars, revolutions and dictatorships, the first appearance of a mass society capable of expressing cultures and systems of communication in line with its needs: these are the most obvious stages of a history that was also recorded as it happened, in various forms and media. Among these, key importance certainly attaches to photography. It is evident that mankind had never before been in possession of an instrument capable of supplying such an enormous number of images of such universal accessibility as regards both visibility and creation. The Kodak camera, a device anyone could use, and the popular illustrated press are the two cornerstones of this aspect of the photographic history of the twentieth century. This richly illustrated book – complete with synoptic tables and a summary glossary – offers a wide-ranging survey of this era that will delight and inform a constantly growing audience.