Photography Exhibition Tell me a story: Young Italian Photography

Every day, hundreds of millions of photographs are viewed, shared, exchanged, evaluated, appreciated or trashed. Even when we do not want it, we are beset by images, with their load of information, emotions and injunctions more or less veiled.

In the days of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, digital technology and social networks have radically transformed our relationship to photography. We live in the illusion of being all photographers, authors and consumers of thousands of images, both victims and perpetrators of the viral dimension and instantaneous dominant photographic hypertrophy. A condition that avoids all critical reflection, preferring instinctive and immediate abandonment to the drive, the obsession with speed and ubiquity, mass narcissism and its drifts.

This is the context that must inevitably be taken into account by all those who are confronted with photography with professional and artistic intentions, in search of an originality that is able to overcome the commonplace and the repetition. This is the case of Alessandra Calò, Ilaria Crosta, Enrico Di Nardo, Giorgio Di Noto, Karim El Maktafi, Francesco Levy, Michele Palazzi, Michela Palermo and Federica Sasso: nine talented young Italian photographers gathered by the expert eye by Laura Serani as part of the exhibition entitled Tell me a story: Young Italian Photography / Raccontami una storia: the nuova fotogra a italiana.

Ten years after a first exhibition devoted to new Italian photography, the Italian Cultural Institute offers an updated review – partial and provisional, of course, but no less necessary – for new generations of Italian photography, highlighting its richness, diversity and creative energy.

To escape the standardization of the images of the globalized world, these young artists from all over Italy are trying to forcefully assert a point of view and an original way of looking at reality. Their work without preconceptions and stereotypes demands that we observe their photographs without prejudices, giving up our habit of looking absent-mindedly at reality and taking away the space of an instant from the uninterrupted flow of images in which we are immersed. Their intense photographs lead us to redefine our gaze, matching it with theirs. Only in this way will we be able to understand and understand the story they try to tell us each time – with different techniques and extremely varied subjects, such as the condition of the young, the nocturnal landscapes, the hidden world of the dark web, the ghost towns, the theme of the origins or the photographic tradition – inviting us to make a journey rich in discoveries that will help us to change perspective and to read the world with different eyes. Which can only be salutary in our age of illusory certainty.

Fabio Gambaro, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute of Paris

For more information: https://iicparigi.esteri.it/iic_parigi/fr/gli_eventi/calendario/2019/06/expo-raconte-moi-une-histoire-la.html