George Vogiatzakis

GeorgeVogiatzakis.gr

While the answer to the question “Why do I take photos?” might look easy, the more I delve into my work I realize that I haven’t got any convincing answers to the question.

Why do I insist, come back and utilize some specific motif to develop compositions? Why do I choose low resolution? How is a trivial aspect of reality transformed into something more meaningful in the world of photography? Why do posters showing people and statues pull me closer to them so that I can set them up in a tender but at the same time upsetting manner? Is the picture itself that touches me or a vague remembrance thereof?

As if there is an internal resistance to hold back the answers for fear that decodification will push me into a conscious mechanism of production of identical pictures without any authenticity or soul.

A tormenting process, which I however enjoy, because, to the initial question “Why do I take photos?” – I can now give a more substantive answer: because I long for that surprise that I will feel when, once again, reality will reappear before my eyes transformed, different, mysterious and unpredictable.

— George Vogiatzakis, Athens, Greece

Lorenzo Valloriani

LorenzoValloriani.com

The Memory of the Present is a photographic exploration of the Tuscan area of Italy, photographed in 2017 and 2018 in over 40 urban and suburban locations.
 
This ongoing project captures the most mundane and typical elements of landscape: countryside crossroads, vernacular architectures, river banks, memorial statues, ruins of ancient walls, postwar buildings infrastructure — things that could be seen in any Tuscan locality. 

It’s also a work about collective memory and archetypes. The project focuses on the altered landscape, urban and rural in equal parts, trying to emerge to eyes and mind — the image of the everyday landscape that we tend unconsciously to suppress.

— Lorenzo Valloriani, Florence, Italy

Larry Sykes

LarrySykes.com

The photographer Robert Adams mercilessly documented a rapidly-urbanizing 1970s Colorado — my home state — in the masterpieces What We Bought, The New West, and Denver. The urban landscapes of that era, often disturbingly indifferent to ecology yet appealingly unselfconscious in today’s context, are disappearing under a wave of redevelopment. These are a few fragments of the old spirit from Denver, Boulder and beyond.

— Larry Sykes, Denver, Colorado, USA

Adriano Nicoletti

AdrianoNicoletti.it

Salento without makeup, in the season of calm, clearly reveals the relationship between nature, as primary element, and place, as the result of cultural and instrumental elaboration of human action.

The seaboard is the physical and ideal boundary of the “Finibus Terrae,” and is where the contamination concept of the two components acquires a symbolic and intense symbolism.

“Finibus Terrae” is where are visible, often in a violent and contradictory manner, the signs of the human passage, egocentric and obtuse, and driven by an exclusive economic impulse. Lasting traces of a culture weakened and polluted by the arid dynamics of the market.

In this period of the year, in days veiled by a sky covered with a light layer of clouds, emerges an atmosphere of expectation and suspense. That atmosphere seems refer to a hope for a future that will happen; but that hope turns soon into resignation. The destiny of these places is now written in indelible signs of permanent and invasive modification of the human passage.

“Finibus Terrae” investigates Salento, Italy, a geographical place, and a physical limit too, where the land meets the sea; where the writing of places is rarefied; when this writing action fades absorbed by an increasingly engulfing urbanization.

— Adriano Nicoletti, Parabita, Lecce, Italy