Created for a special issue of the magazine “Cartaditalia” of the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, the selection of artists in this exhibition presents a cross-section of recent Italian photography while at the same time attempting to show the variety of outcomes and if not a trend then at least a commonality of attitude and outlook that helps to understand the characteristics of an Italian line of photography.

According to curator Elio Grazioli, it is constitutionally not homogeneous and linear, it is, instead, composed of individuality and transversal: “It is the “poetics” of the individual artists, it seems to us, what makes them original and irreducible, and what we most want to highlight in any case. After all, it is always it that makes us call them “artists” even before calling them “photographers” beyond any linguistic or formal choice.”

But, upstream, why photography? Why photography again?

Because photography today seems to us to be at a very particular junction. No longer anxious to refine a technique or to pursue an aesthetic derived from other forms of expression, nor even to convince itself that it has one of its own, on the contrary, at the crossroads of a possible “revolution”, the digital-virtual one, it is wondering on a much broader scale, more general and more detailed at the same time: more general because it asks itself what an “image” is in this era in which we talk of nothing else; more detailed because today, more than ever before, we realize that all it takes is the slightest change of light, of print, of framing, of composition, sometimes even only of context or intention, we would like to say of gaze, and the photographic image, by no means mechanical, changes completely. That is, both the magic, if one can still call it that, and the construction, that is, the transformations in these fields too that photography has introduced and is introducing, are rediscovered in all their potential. On one hand, photography today is the key to understanding communication, on the other hand it makes us “go mad with pity”, as Roland Barthes urged in the wake of Nietzsche. With this selection, an attempt has been made to account for all this, not according to an orderly line, but through a constellation that restores sensitivities and concerns, intentions and attitudes.