The New Photographic Topography

​"Giacomo Cattaruzzi is a flâneur of contemporaneity. He does not travel on foot in the avenues and Parisian "passages" like Charles Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin, but with his car on the roads [...] in search of his "new common places" [...] The photographic work made by Wim Wenders, on the occasion of his stay in the United States for the making of the film Paris, Texas, Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1984, comes to mind. When I look at Cattaruzzi's photographs, I have in my ears the soundtrack to that film written by Ry Cooder, and his guitar. Old caravans, truck trailers, skeletons of billboards, [...] signs recorded by the New Friulian Topographer when he moves in a known territory, "at home," but also when he is a guest abroad.

Cattaruzzi likes to repeat that the visitor to the exhibition should not linger to try to recognize the places he photographs. Indeed, industrial or artisan zones that have become deserted places in the time of crisis could be found in many parts of Europe. Better to indulge, then, the author's desire, without bothering to identify the shooting locations and without historicizing buildings or urbanized areas, getting lost in anonymous parking lots or shopping malls." 

(Antonio Giusa, about the exhibition "New Common Places - from territory to non-place", 2015)

Photographing the Silence

Photographing the silence also means photographing in silence. The photographer who narrates the silence of a place does so without people, without noise, often without spectacle, where the silent actors are the sky, the mountains, the desert, the snow. As a photographer, I found these elements first at our mountains, in the Sauris area, and many years later on the other side of the world, in the infinite spaces of the deserts of the American west and Death Valley. ​

"A characteristic of Cattaruzzi's photographs is the perception of silence: the silence that has a sound, the one that in daily life we are no longer able to hear. Here, then, it is evident how Giacomo's need to do photography arises from the rejection of the habit of daily life, made of work, stress, weekly rhythms, in order to find again the contact with Nature and open spaces: and this is another aspect that I fully share. And finally, a very important concept: do not look at his images with a microscope, but with your eyes; and if you can, look at them with your eyes closed." 

(Cristiana Damiano, about the exhibition "L'ultima Oasi", 2014)