The International Photography Festival in Rome reaches its 10th edition this year with a project that confirms the event’s growing national and international prestige. Its purpose is to promote contemporary photography in its different forms and languages, and also to support new talents at the national and international levels.
Motherland
The International Photography Festival in Rome reaches its 10th edition this year with a project that confirms the event’s growing national and international prestige. Its purpose is to promote contemporary photography in its different forms and languages, and also to support new talents at the national and international levels. For September 23rd and 24th, the Festival organizes meetings, lectures, workshops, presentations and screenings.
The theme of this edition is MOTHERLAND covered by: Alec Soth, Tim Davis, Guy Tillim, David Spero, Leonie Purchas, David Farrell, Tod Papageorge, Paolo Ventura, Antonio Biasiucci, Anders Petersen and Guido Guidi.
Motherland, curated by Marco Delogu, aims to show and stimulate an analysis of the relationship between land and identity. A connection established between photography and territory, based on an analysis between the artists and the places to which they feel. Everyone replies in their own way, examining lands that belong to them, whether they are old or new, large or small, real or virtual, with absolutely personal documentation, which is the fruit of their life and the need to return or move away.
The Motherland collective show treats the Festival’s theme through the gazes of photographers who in previous years made important contributions to building the Festival’s identity: Graciela Iturbide‘s Mexico, Don McCullin’s beginnings in London and his work on Somerset, Leonard Freed’s New York, Sally Mann’s Virginia, and lastly RFK’s funeral train, the only “motherland” in the photo shot by Paul Fusco on that memorable day, July 8, 1968.
With these five great artists we enter the heart of the show, which features works by eleven photographers, some rethought for this collection, others produced for the occasion:
Antonio Biasiucci’s Naples pays tribute to the city that welcomed him. For him Naples is black, an accumulation of lights, shadows and materials from which emerges only what he wants to let us see. A wall of thirty pictures sums up thirty years of Naples.
Guido Guidi has always been interested in his world, his land, and every tiny fragment that makes it up. He photographs its history through its objects and details; A country, Italy, roamed and experienced by many people but that he alone manages to see. His River series is spare and timeless; here what we see is not objects but a recapitulation of many earlier works: a colored nature in which the artist peers at himself and sees the signs of his whole world.
Paolo Ventura exhibits three works. In the most recent one he enters the scene for the first time. Returning to his motherland after years spent in America, Ventura becomes the protagonist of his sets and stories. “This is my land,” he says, “my timeless story, fake but true.”
David Farrell returns after many years to Innocent Landscapes, where people are searching for the bodies of Catholic Irishmen killed by the IRA and never returned to their families, picking over and devastating the landscapes in order to certify history. This work of Farrell’s was born of his need to return to his motherland.
For years David Spero has visited communities that have built and live in eco-friendly, low-impact settlements across the United Kingdom. These communities, born to respect nature and in contrast with Britain’s economic boom in the mid-1990s, seek their motherland in full adherence to the land.
Leonie Hampton (formally Léonie Purchas)’s work concentrates on the life of her mother, Bron. For over a decade, Bron found it impossible to empty the packing boxes which had filled her new home since the collapse of her first marriage. The boxes were a constant physical reminder to her family of Bron’s long-running battle with OCD and depression. Already shown at the Rome Photography Festival in 2008, now combines original photographs with found family images. With In the Shadow of Things she received the F Award (2008).
Anders Petersen, he remodulates his works with his presence. Petersen is in his photos; his body is just beyond the edge of the pictures. We can see him touch and converse with the people he portrays, circle around objects and landscapes and talk to them. His work Far Back Home describes the land where he was born and lives. Anders feels at home everywhere in the world, but in Sweden he feels still more that he’s part of the whole human race.
Tod Papageorge presents six images from his work Passing Through Eden, shot between 1969 and 1991 in New York’s Central Park. The Park is a motherland that Papageorge has roamed for years. In his black-and-white photos he captures human tragedies and the human comedy.
Tim Davis, a student of Papageorge’s at Yale, explores his own Hudson Valley in a video entitled Upstate New York Olympics. He invents new sports such as “Leapfrog Jockey Prato,” “Knife Toss Trash Day” and “Compost Freestyle,” and demonstrates them in front of the video camera. In a world obsessed by television, where the rulebooks of many sports have been revised to fit TV’s needs, Davis relives his land with irony and transgression.
Guy Tillim went back to his old apartment in Johannesburg and spent months living alongside the new black residents who replaced the middle-class whites after the end of apartheid.The result is the diary of a new motherland.
Alec Soth shows five photos from Sleeping by the Mississippi, his first book and first major work. Soth starts in Minnesota, where he was born and still lives, and travels all the way downstream to Louisiana. Soth tells his tale without rhetoric or sensationalism, his story of Mississippi is a new way of seeing and portraying motherlands.
Emiliana Tedesco
Fotografia- Festival Internazionale di Roma
From septembre 23 to October 23, 2011
Macro Testaccio _ Piazza O. Giustiniani 4
Rome
