What is photography? In Matera, photographer Angelo Galantini's exhibition on the ethics of photography

Photography ethics: what is a photograph, how true it is, how subjective it is. To this theme is dedicated Angelo Galantini ’s exhibition Comforting Counterfeits, which opened in Matera on August 19, at the Cine Sud Gallery Space, as part of the photographic project Conscience of Man.

Protagonist of the “food for thought” in the third quarter of the review, curated by Francesco Mazza and Maurizio Rebuzzini, Galantini’s exhibition stems from the chance finding of 66 prints in a flea market, depicting hotels in holiday resorts between the 1930s and 1950s: the project opens, through photography, a debate on photography itself and the role it plays in the lives of each of us. Visibly retouched, blatantly artificial, the reproductions of the images found and offered in the exhibition are curiously fascinating because in their obvious fiction they suggest dutiful questions (how much of what we see is true? What, today, is reality? Can we still find it, or must we understand that nothing, or almost nothing, of what we observe on TV, in newspapers, in advertisements, is true? And what is right, or wrong, about the obsessive pursuit of dazzling, splendid perfection?) So many indeed are the doubts that come before a photograph that is as beautiful as it is artifactual.

According to Galantini, the photography profession rejects the label of mere representation of reality, claims the faculty of proposing a personal and subjective interpretation of the object, and cannot omit the use of artifice to exercise its art.“Excluding journalistic photography, which has a moral and professional obligation to faithfully reproduce reality,” reads the exhibition presentation, “photography is always, despite itself, an apparent truth. The shot, whatever it is, is nothing more than the photographer’s point of view, nothing more than a clipping of truth, the angle from which the author has chosen to show us what is in front of his eyes. There is no need, therefore, to resort to retouching to recognize that photography is, by its very nature, fiction, and it is here that its magic is triggered, its ability to give us a dream, its power to seduce and enchant, with skillful beauty, the souls of those who approach it.”

Consciousness of Man and all scheduled events are financed by Cine Sud of Catanzaro in collaboration with Hasselblad, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Sigma, Sony, Tokina-Howa, and Toscana Foto Service, which have made possible the realization and free enjoyment of the events.

The exhibition closes on August 26.

Hours: 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 4:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Pictured: Angelo Galantini, Hotel Como, Hotel Ristorante Barchetta

Source: release

What is photography? In Matera, photographer Angelo Galantini's exhibition on the ethics of photography

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