Davide Monteleone – THE RED THISTLE
A professional photo-reporter since 1998, the Italian Davide Monteleone won the 2011 European Publisher’s prize for photography awarded by five European photo-editors. For many years his beat was the countries of the northern Caucasus (Chechnya, South Ossetia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Dagestan, etc.) as they tried to cope with the collapse of the ex-Soviet Union. His work, focusing on consequences of the different conflicts and upheavals of the twentieth century’s end in regions stressed not only by a strong ethnic and religious diversity but also by powerful geopolitical stakes, manages to restore a sense of the complexity as well as the fragility of peoples and situations in the face of new and unstable frontiers that recent history has drawn, most often by force.
