s.t. foto libreria galleria is a place specialized in photographic art with an exhibition space and a library. The gallery shows and sells projects by contemporary photographers and artists, vintage prints by authors, studios and agencies from XIX and XX century and an archive composed of photographs and documentary images of various kinds. The permanent collection revolves mainly around the Italian scene, with works, by Mario Schifano, Ugo Mulas, Mario Giacomelli, Tazio Secchiaroli, Arturo Ghergo, Mimmo Jodice, Tano D’Amico, Letizia Battaglia. On the library’s shelves it is possible to find both new and used photographic books and collectible volumes, but also publications on contemporary art, kids books and old illustrated magazines. Moreover, s.t. promotes and hosts book and video presentations, workshops, live performances and different kinds of ad hoc events.
s.t. foto libreria galleria returns to MIA Fair with AA.VV.-Anonimo: not the work of a single artist, but a selection of orphan images that leads us towards a multiplicity of extra-artistic practices (vernacular but also professional) of twentieth century photography: from family snapshots to studio portraits; from amateur voyeurism to social documentaries; from anonymous travel journals to self-advertising business catalogues. As well as aiming to reclaim individual original prints, the work of s.t. on found photography evolves through a series of editing operations of documents from the past and through the reprint of some particularly meaningful photographic collections. One of these is Useful Portraits, a project – curated with Alvaro Petricig of the Centro studi Nediža – which pairs and reformats two distinct mid-20th century portrait archives: the images by a ‘village photographer’, Tin Piernu, active in northern Friuli, and those of the Indian Cithra Studio. The vintage photographs by the latter, originally framed with decorated passe-partout have found their place in frame-boxes made of canvas which amplify the physical characteristics of the photographic object. From Tin Piernu’s original glass plates, on the other hand, they produced a series of cotton paper prints which underline the unpredictable weave of the photographic material: its mistakes, in the shooting as well as in the printing process, or the metamorphosis that the images have gone through in the course of their ‘chemical existence’, reliant as they are on traditional methods. Around the universe of the photographic mistake (to which Clément Chéroux has devoted a brilliant essay) and the damage to visual documents, s.t. and Nediža have developed photography projects. And it is precisely around the reformatting on paper of accidental images, in the textual reframing of photos from the past, that is so often the work of orphaned memory of “the short century” that overlaps with contemporary art research.
s.t. foto libreria galleria
via degli ombrellari, 25
00193 Roma (Italy)
tel/fax +39 06 64760105
[email protected]
