Italian Far East

The New Landscape is not the reproduction of the mess that man (often, but not always) wreaks on the landscape. It is not the cataloguing of the ugly or the beautiful, the complacency of neglect or wonder, the display of decay or perfection. It is the landscape emptied of the elements of wonder that Nature offers us. It is the landscape so ordinary as to be seemingly devoid of subject matter, but so intense in the intimate that it can be heard, if contemplated. It is the contemporary everyday landscape, devoid of opinion and interpretation, but not without feeling. Light poles like new trees, cultivated fields and parking lots like new meadows, and the artifacts of man scattered here and there like new mushrooms. The night illuminated by lights too small to really brighten it, and the earth pierced by billboards, street lamps, and road signs, like a silent Saint Sebastian.

 "Italian Far East" is a celebration of the New Landscape, it is a photograph of the spectacle of the landscape changed at the hands of man, it is a depiction of the particular flavor that these lands, for many years frontier lands, take on in the light of beauty. Its spaces have been created by man with a characteristic hand, almost evoking a far west, by curious inversion of the cardinal points.

Forty years after "The New West" by Robert Adams, among the fathers and among the most significant exponents of New American Landscape photography, even in our region, the "far east" of a great and varied country that has given so much to art and photography, the 2014 "Italian Far East" exhibition wanted to remind us how beauty in photography does not reside only in the wonders of Nature, but how it shows itself, to the eyes of those who want to seek it out and listen to it, in the landscapes and visions of the everyday, of the present, of the tangible reality of today.