Category: italy

Between Castelfranco Veneto in Veneto and Lecce in Puglia, the photographs of Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz dialogue with each other, following the rhythm of unexpected events and unique encounters.

In 2021, Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz were invited to take part in two photographic projects in Italy, one in Castelfranco Veneto (the Veneto region) and the other in Lecce (Puglia). The subject intended to drive the work was ‘nature’; a word with so many variations of meaning in the context of today’s diversified, fragmented landscape, which constantly reflects our lives as well as condition the way that we observe reality.

This book compiles a selection of the artists’ photographs of these two Italian regions so far apart from one another. These are places where nature reveals itself through different forms of expression and where the relationship between body and space, captured in a combination of light and shade, seems to take on an inconsistent and sometimes absolute value.

Insieme (together) tells of a photographic experience in Italy that was composed in the form of an intimate, personal diary. With the artists’ dual gaze gently organizing a narrative structure, Rozovsky and Steinmetz’s photographs sit alongside one another, alternating and rotating in harmony with a discontinuous, fluctuating rhythm, just as in life’s episodes. These pictures, which seem almost poised to capture unexpected events and unusual encounters but especially moments of a shared daily life, express a singular familiarity with the places being found, conveying the natural character of their authenticity.

Biographies

Irina Rozovsky (born in 1981 in Moscow) studied at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts.
She makes photographs of people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. She lives in Athens, Georgia, USA where she and her husband Mark Steinmetz run the photography workshop space The Humid.

Mark Steinmetz (born in 1961 in New York) lives in Athens, Georgia. He graduated in photography from Yale University in 1986. Working mainly in series, his black-and-white photographs evoke a variety of subjects, from the innocence of small-town children and teenagers in the American Southeast, to the bustling streets of Paris and the peaceful landscapes of Italian towns.

This print is part of a series of prints by 5 women photographers that we have previously published: Irina Rozovsky, Clémentine Schneidermann, Mikiko Hara, Moe Suzuki and Deanna Dikeman.

Like a door into their intimacy and captivating simplicity, Silence is a Gift gently celebrates the inhabitants of Southern Italy, a region still scarred by modern tragedies.

Rione Sanità (Naples), Santa Lucia (Cosenza), Torre del Greco. There are places in Southern Italy that carry scars of incurable wounds on the walls and on the flesh of its inhabitants. In those wounds lay the historical memory and the real face of people. Their names are Alfonso, Elena, Marco, Stefania, to name a few. Some are from the same districts and know each other, others don’t. But they have one thing in common: they’ve all met Ciro Battiloro, who has followed them into the intimacy of their home, with his camera and with his heart. He portrayed their everyday life by taking part in it. Never an intruder, Ciro Battiloro is a friend, a brother, and a confident. He doesn’t focus so much on the marginality, but rather on the extraordinary vitality. He has seen new lives being born, children becoming teenagers, and then parents in their turn. He also had to say goodbye. Silence is a Gift is about love and loneliness, life and death, pain and joy — but most importantly, about intimacy and resistance.

Biography

Ciro Battiloro (born in 1984 in Torre del Greco) is an Italian photographer based in Napoli. He studied philosophy at The University of Naples Federico II and later on specialized in documentary photography.
Ciro uses a very intimate approach: it is through everyday life that he tackles broader social thematics.
His work has been published in several magazines and exhibited in various museums, galleries and festivals.