Olim Palus (Photography)

OLIM PALUS
GABRIELE ROSSI

Everything started in 1926, when Benito Mussolini arranged for the great drainage of a piece of land in the center of Italy. Pioneers from northern Italy were called to work on this project, to defy nature and malaria, with the promise of a house and ten hectares of land to farm.

Littoria was born six years later, a project designed by the architect Oriolo Frezzotti, and one of the major creations of the Rationalist movement; the city quickly gained worldwide attention.

After World War II, the city changed its name to avoid any reference to Fascism; today, Latina has 120,000 residents and is surrounded on one side by the mountains and on the other side by the sea.

The photographs shown here depict the short, layered life of a very young Italian city. A vertical shifting vision, where the city opens itself up as it takes the shape of a contemporary archeology.

The city’s history, after all, is unique and fast-paced, as opposed to the thousand-year-old history of Italy, but it is still storing in its shape the sequence of its own path: pain, death, glory, identity, destruction.

— Gabriele Rossi

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Gabriele Rossi was born in Latina in 1979. He studied photography in Rome and Milan before interning with Francesco Jodice on several editorial projects. Rossi returned to his hometown and found himself traveling backward through his memories, to compare how the city had changed. His photography book ITACA was published in 2017 by Yard Press, and he has been exhibited widely in Italy. Check out his website here.

Lifting Ground Shadows (Photography)

LIFTING GROUND SHADOWS
BY ENRICO DI NARDO

Enrico di Nardo photographed “Lifting Ground Shadows” in the territory that used to be Lake Fucino, Italy, which was drained in the nineteenth century. Di Nardo’s photographs are eerie, lonely, like bits of memory that have floated up to the surface. He highlights the uncomfortable meeting of new and old natural environments – the replacement of a noxious natural space with a productive-yet-bland man-made space. 

From The Draining of Lake Fucino (1876):  

Those who dwell by the side of a dangerous lake, are always exposed to the risk of seeing their fields become a prey to the advancing waters often for several years at a time, and when at last by the receding of the lake they regain possession of their property, they have to incur a heavy expenditure to render the land fit for cultivation, besides being exposed to all the maladies produced by the swampy condition of the soil. But how long can they be sure of enjoying what costs them such enormous sacrifices? Sometimes the land scarcely begins to be productive when a new rising of the lake reduces them again to misery. But on the shores of Lake Fucino this terrible state of things was more severely felt than elsewhere, for the Marsi, who inhabited the very mountainous country about the lake, had no other plain but that of Fucino to which they could look for their supplies of cereals and other produce of the soil. The rest of the territory being, in fact, nothing but steep mountain sides on which cultivation was next to impossible, and which the interest of the country itself forbade to be cleared of its forests and pastures.

The Marsi seeing their inability to cope with the evil, had recourse in their ignorance to a supposed god of the Fucino, they raised temples to him and were liberal of vows and offerings, but in vain, for the capricious god did not cease in the least from his hostilities. The moment came, however, in which his victims reflected that there was a human genius which might successfully cope with that of the lake; they turned their eyes to Julius Caesar, and he, desirous of pleasing the Marsi, whose friendship he had learned to value during the social war, promised to come to their assistance.

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Enrico Di Nardo grew up in Pescara, Italy, and graduated with a degree in physics from Pisa University. After studying neuroscience, he moved to Paris to conduct research on the neural basis of memory. He taught himself photography while on leave from the university and studied documentary photography in Rome for one year. Starting in 2015, his works have been included in group exhibitions and slideshows in Italy, Malaysia, Greece, and France. He took part in the performances of TempsZero and his work was featured in the photobook A Place Both Wonderful and Strange (FuegoBooks 2017), a collection of works inspired by David Lynch's Twin Peaks.

Dove da qui (Photography)

Dove da qui

by Sabina Damiani

Sabina Damiani: This project is a note about (almost) abandoned bus stops. It literally deals with time and the phenomenon of transition (traffic), and it comments on the silent disintegration of the once unique (unified) Istrian peninsula, as well as the cracked connections between the people who inhabit it. The spiritual community of a bus has been, to a large extent, replaced by a deceptive sense of individual, automotive independence: waiting rooms actually become informal monuments of the architecture of an overrun era.

There is a sense of emptiness I tried to capture with this project. A lost bus stop where no buses ever come, an infinite waiting for Godot (or for a better time) that never comes. I was also interested in non-places as Marc Augé depicted them; an impersonal, transitional space that we only see as we go by – we never stop, never think, never meet anyone.

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Sabina Damiani was born in Koper, Slovenia, in 1985. She studied Visual Arts and Education at the Fine Art Academy in Venice and gained her MA in Photography at the Fine Art Academy Brera in Milan. Her work could be placed in the intersection of the creation of images and mapping – telling stories, researching collective and personal memories, as well as collective and personal amnesia, narrating the complexities of certain territories and the people who inhabit them. She has exhibited her works internationally and has been featured in a variety of publications, including Ignant, L’Oeil de la Photographie, Fotografia Europea, and Landscape Stories. Visit her website here.

Monopoly (Photography)

Monopoly

By Mike Osborne

Mike Osborne on his series: Monopoly is set in Atlantic City and revolves around the historical connection between the city’s street grid and the iconic board game’s properties. Like Floating Island, which was published in 2014, the project is about the site and its history as well as the use of photography as a means of modeling the world. Originally inspired by “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” a 1972 essay by John McPhee, Monopoly translates the game board’s map into photographs that grapple with Atlantic City’s complicated past and present. This gesture of converting abstractions—the purple rectangles known as Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues, for example—into carefully rendered representations of actual places is mildly absurd but also serious, an oblique means of reflecting on the problems that have plagued many American cities over the last half-century.

Osborne notes that his statement was written well before Trump’s candidacy and election. The project was shot mostly between 2012 and 2014, and looking back, he explains that he “inadvertently tracked the demise of Trump’s casinos. While working on the photographs and a related video piece, Trump Plaza and, more recently, the Trump Taj Mahal closed.”

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Mike Osborne is a photographer living in Austin, Texas. His work touches on a range of themes including architecture, landscape, history, and technology, ultimately taking the form of books and exhibitions. His first book, Floating Island, was published in summer 2014. Follow his work on his website here.

Dreary Town (Photography)

Dreary Town

By Enrico Doria

Enrico Doria’s series Dreary Town was inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” Doria photographed his series with a Holga camera, capturing the towns of Sicily (Trapani and Palermo), Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Sarajevo, Milano, Johannesburg, and Tallin.

Thanks to Doria’s distinctive look (high-contrast, slightly shaken, and deliberately imperfect), his photographs feel at times like glimpses. The glimpse of a man or woman going to work, or to the train station; a wanderer glancing upward. Yet there is a deliberate sameness to these glimpses, which extends from Johannesburg to Paris. The sameness of modern life, of the memories created by an identical commute. Here the well-traveled city is a receptacle of memories (psychically recorded by workers and travelers), which are all alike. Doria writes that he wanted to portray the “impersonality of the city, showing the cold regularity of some urban architecture and the small places in which many of us are living, sometimes in contrast with the spaces all around.” 

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Enrico Doria was born in Palermo in 1978 and received his PhD in Genetics and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Pavia. He currently works in Pavia. His photographs have been published widely in several national and international magazines, including LensCulture and Lomography. He has exhibited his photography, which he often shoots on medium format film, in various Italian and foreign cities, including at the Spaziofarini6 Gallery in Milan. Follow his work on his website here.

Doria recently prepared a book dummy for his photography series Esprits, which you can – and should! – check out here.

Egypt in Silence (Photography)

Egypt in Silence

By Violetta Tonolli

Violetta Tonolli on “Egypt in Silence”: Living in Cairo makes me forget the feeling of silence. Living here accustoms us to a continuous and perpetual noise, one which becomes the soundtrack to each and every one of our lives.

Walking through thousands of bodies, which move slowly and continuously in every direction; walking through the cars, the donkeys and their carts, the bicycles, the motorbikes and the microbuses makes me feel part of a stream of life, but at the same time immensely lonely.

The rarity of the experience of silence makes it even more important and precious for me and so I tried to capture the silence of Cairo with my eyes, looking for visual expressions of emptiness which would restore an experience of wellness with my inner self, a positive sensation of solitude.

The aesthetics of silence accompanied me in the desert, where I looked for traces of human life, above all traces of abandonment, which would bring me a sense of inner solitude. This intimate feeling of solitude was linked to the one I felt in Cairo. The experience I uncovered through my camera has helped me to rediscover myself within the context of a conscious solitude; a solitude that has made me feel closer to the deeper parts of myself and, in consequence, more capable of appreciating and understanding the numerous faces of Egypt.

In this compilation, I gather the images that represent the path I walked to attain this feeling of silence.

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Violetta Tonollli was born in 1989 and grew up in Milan. At the University of Turin, she read Arabic and English literature and developed a passion for photography, which she then devoted herself to. Following her graduation, she learned from Fulvio Bortolozzo, a well-known cityscape photographer and professor at the IED of Turin. She traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East and resided for two years in Egypt.

Tonolli now lives in Paris, where she continues her work in cityscape and experimental photography. She has exhibited her project “Egypt in Silence” in the Goethe Institute in Cairo, and the project was published in the photography magazine REST. She received first place in the 2016 “L’anno della luce” photography competition hosted by Phos Turin.

Last House Standing (Photography)

Last House Standing

By Ben Marcin

Ben Marcin on “Last House Standing”: One of the architectural quirks of certain cities on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. is the solo row house. Standing alone, in some of the most distressed neighborhoods, these nineteenth-century structures were once attached to similar row houses that made up entire city blocks. Time and major demographic changes have resulted in the decay and demolition of many such blocks of row houses. Occasionally, one house is spared — literally cut off from its neighbors and left to the elements with whatever time it has left.

My interest in these solitary buildings is not only in their ghostly beauty but in their odd, almost defiant, placement in the urban landscape. Often three stories high, they were clearly not designed to stand alone like this. Many details that might not be noticed in a homogeneous row of twenty attached row houses become apparent when everything else has been torn down. And then there's the lingering question of why a single row house was allowed to remain upright. Still retaining traces of its former glory, the last house standing is often still occupied.

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Most of Ben Marcin’s photographic essays explore the idea of home and the passing of time. “Last House Standing” and “The Camps” have received wide press both nationally and abroad (The Paris Review, iGnant, La Repubblica, Slate, Wired Magazine). More recently, Marcin has been exploring the myriad structures of the urban core in series like Towers, Streets and Stairwells. His photographs have been shown at a number of national galleries and venues including the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Delaware Art Museum; The Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA; The Center for Fine Art Photography in Ft. Collins, CO; The Photographic Resource Center in Boston; and the Houston Center for Photography. Last House Standing (And Other Stories) was featured in a 2014 solo exhibit at the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore. Marcin's work is also in several important collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art. He is represented by the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland.