Otto volte due: A window into contemporary Romagna photography by Isabelle Young
9 September – 15 October 2022
Large Glass, 392 Caledonian Road, London N1 1DN
Nicola Baldazzi, Febbraio, 2020, c-type hand print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, 18 x 18 cm (Image Courtesy Nicola Baldazzi and Large Glass, London)
Before the pandemic, I spent the first week of many a new year photographing towns across northern Italy. In that week between New Year’s Day and Epifania an expectant quiet falls. Most shutters remain closed. Lingering mist is punctuated by a blinding sunlight not yet strong enough to warm faces or stone. Since enduring myriad lockdowns, that quiet sense of desertion became a familiar sensation across even the most thronging cities.
Otto volte due at Large Glass, London (until 15th October) presents the work of eight contemporary Romagna photographers whose works contain this now familiar intensity of regard for one’s immediate surroundings. Yet these photographers have long possessed an ability to elevate the everyday. Their work emits a sense of devotion and reflects Guido Guidi’s declaration that photography is “a way of bowing down before things.” Working in large format analogue photography, their work holds the solitude of prayer. This medium requires a lengthy set up, patience and precision. These photographers are not shooting from the hip, per se, but share a calm approach to their enduring subject. Such technical precision is countered by an openness and intrigue regarding how a new and particular detail has the capacity to transform a familiar scene.
Marcello Galvani, ‘Bologna, 01.05.2018’ 2018, C-type hand print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, 19.5 x 24.5 cm (Image Courtesy Marcello Galvani and Large Glass, London)
Francesco Neri, Faenza, 2.04.2011, 2011, C-type hand print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, 19.5 x 24.5 cm (Image Courtesy Francesco Neri and Large Glass, London)
Otto volte due conveys a collective sense of having only strayed metres from the photographers’ front doors. A pulling back to the place that bore them. The exhibition works are rooted in Romagna - both to the ground itself and the legacy of its founding generation of photographers. After the photographer and writer Luigi Ghirri suddenly passed away in 1992, his friends and contemporaries Guido Guidi and Cesare Fabbri have carried and shared the torch with younger generations to establish a burgeoning photography scene across Emilia Romagna. (Guido Guidi teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts of Ravenna, where most of these photographers studied under him. Cesare Fabbri founded Osservatorio Fotografico - an experimental platform for research on photography - alongside art historian Silvia Loddo). Otto volte due therefore unites each photographer's singular exploration of their region through collaborations and collective research.
Contemporary Italy exists through a visible past which pervades the landscape. Joining the towns like dots across Emilia Romagna is the once-Roman road Via Emilia which connects the towns in which these photographers all live and work. The Via Emilia also charts the history of Northern Italy’s industrial boom which reshaped a once agricultural country. Such history pervades even the most recent works in Otto volte due - from Francesca Gardini’s faded marshmallow-pink stone to Francesco Neri’s ‘Faenza, 2.04.2011’ in which a pencil drawing of a southern Italian beach scene sits against a fading wallpaper of perhaps once-pink roses, uniting North and South. An overriding sense prevails of a landscape that has witnessed significant change - a post-unification Italy of industrialisation and world wars - and which carries these memories into the present for its grandchildren to witness.
Installation view Otto volte due, Large Glass, London, 2022 (Photo: Stephen White and Co)
Cartography of Italy subtly pervades much of the photographers' work, as though imbued with an acknowledgement that the ‘whole picture’ is not of interest or more simply does not exist. ‘Febbraio 2020’ by Nicola Baldazzi depicts a moss-covered stone orb which calls to Luigi Ghirri’s response to seeing the first ever images of the Earth from space in 1969;
‘It was not only the image of the entire world, but the only image that contained all other images of the world: graffiti, frescoes, paintings, writings, photographs, books, films. It was at once the representation of the world and all representations of the world.’
In February 2020, Italy was already under an intense lockdown and living a future which we were yet to endure in the UK. Baldazzi shared the image on Instagram that March therefore seeing it anew in this exhibition, and in person, poignantly recalls that moment when our world was abruptly reduced. It is an image of swirling yet static global uncertainty.
Baldazzi’s work is accompanied in the exhibition with a text by his long-time collaborator Veronica Lanconelli. It ends with the line ‘the pile of useless objects, left forgotten, behind the house'. There is a sense of no corner left unturned throughout the exhibition works. ‘Bologna, 01.05.2018’ by Marcello Galvani is clearly a view ordinarily unseen yet elevated to centre stage. Often, and especially in the case of Luca Nostri, this can also mean a scene returned to. Nostri’s photographs of Piazza Baracca in his hometown of Lugo reveal the square to be a changing stage for theatrical then very real drama. Preparations for a concert at dawn and opera are both dated 2018. Nori then jumps to a heavy mist upon a nearly-deserted square in 2020. The 2020 scene proceeds the 2018 works at Large Glass thus heightening a foreboding sense of the weeks, months then years ahead during the pandemic.
Installation view Otto volte due, Large Glass, London, 2022 (Photo: Stephen White and Co)
Nori’s works are amongst the few that contain people yet the exhibition begins with a portrait which signifies a shared photographic eye. Alessandra Dragoni's extraordinary work ‘Clara’, 2015 depicts a Daedalus-like hand shielding a child’s eyes from the sun. Yet the hand also serves to perhaps shield the child’s identity from the camera. It is a remarkably intimate portrait of love and protection. ‘Mandriole’, 2013 by Francesca Gardini follows with its abstract swathe of yellow dominating the frame. The Romagna countryside peeks out beyond like a corner of a painting by Richard Diebenkorn.
Alessandra Dragoni, Clara, 2015, C-type hand print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, 20 x 20 cm, (Image Courtesy Alessandra Dragoni and Large Glass, London)
Luca Nostri, Piazza Baracca, Lugo, 2020, 2020, C-type hand print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, 18 x 26 cm (Image Courtesy Luca Nostri and Large Glass, London)
Guidi and Fabbri’s enduring influence on my own practice is profound. And although I venture onto their land, theirs is an inimitable eye. In the exhibition portfolio Otto volte due: Eight conversations on photography (Imagebeeld Edition), each photographer conveys an almost devotional regard for their teachings and quiet approach. Fabbri quotes the Sardinian phrase “it’s the eye that gets the job done” and indeed words will always fail me in relation to his, Guidi and Ghirri’s work. Your own eye will have to seek out their work instead.
Otto volte due is described as presenting ‘contemporary Romagna photography’, Romagna being the historical and south-eastern region within Emilia-Romagna. Such a detail reminds us of Italy’s lingering disquiet at being a unified country. Upon once telling an elderly lady about my family in Turin, from whose house the Alps are often visible, she waved her hand at me, “yes but the Dolomites in Veneto are much more elegant.” And indeed, these photographs depict a unique corner of their divided country. They show a working-class Italy that is not simply visited but lived.
Cesare Fabbri, San Sperate, Cagliari, 2019, C-type hand print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, 15.2 x 15 cm (Image Courtesy Cesare Fabbri and Large Glass, London)
Guidi, Ronta, gennaio, 1998 , C-type hand print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper (Image Courtesy Guido Guidi and Large Glass, London)