Below is an excerpt from the text of the exhibition by Giovanna Calvenzi and a critical text by Jon Bird.
“One of the earliest applications of photography, from its invention, was undoubtedly to enable the recording of the presence of man, or the individual’s feeling of reality, in the field of representations. Photography, after Genre Painting, revealed its incredible ability to translate life through images […] photography offered many uses, more democratic, allowing every woman and man to be part of the territory of memory […] Unlike painting, photography also created a feeling of immediacy in vision and gave the illusion of being within everyone’s reach. Thus, since its invention, photography has achieved this new possibility of describing a human landscape. […]
Defining the existence of this human landscape means being willing to take these paths which lead to the revisitation of the history of photography to discover the roots of contemporary vision. […] We must also reflect on photography’s capacity to mirror the sociology of behaviors. More than any other medium, it is photography that has been entrusted with the task of memory. Photographers, major or minor, conscious or not, continue to bear witness to time, customs, events. In the enormity of photographic production, a fresco of society, a profound and enduring anthropological analysis, is represented unintentionally.”
– Giovanna Calvenzi
