Presented on the occasion of the Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam 2024, this volume contains three critical essays by Lóránd Hegyi on the recent photographic works of Alessandra Calò (The Gardens Tale, 2022 and χθόνιος | chthonic, 2024) and Pietro Bologna (Ettaro | Hectare, 2017-2024), whose artistic production is characterized by two completely different approaches.
Alessandra Calò skillfully uses images to create metaphorical narratives that resonate with our inner world and imagination, to the point that the author calls her a "master of the dramaturgy of evocation".
As Lóránd Hegy wrote in the book: Alessandra Calò's images give us faith in the magical competence of art: through the artistically created images a new awareness of reality will be created. This awareness is revelation and understanding; it's participation in time and history and at the same time a recreation of time in which the viewer as well contributes to the never-ending history. Alessandra Calò is able to reveal this transformation of meaning of time through the intensity of her images without any anecdotical narratives or enjoyable, picturesque storytelling, but purely with the suggestive, powerful enigma of vision.
Otherwise, the artifacts scattered on the ground, found by chance and photographed by the "anarcho-romantic" Pietro Bologna during his morning walk with the dogs in a suburban field, encourage us to go beyond the appearances of reality, allowing each person to find his or her own meanings.
According to Lóránd Hegy: The daily, aimless, repetitive walks, with mobile phone in hand, offer the chance of unforeseen encounters with particular phenomena, which are photographed and later sent away. The self-evident authenticity of these pictorial relevancies creates a specific poetic, metaphorical universe in which different pictorial events take place in parallel, in their competence and in their sovereignty. Pietro Bologna finds these sovereign, autonomous pictorial events in the objective, material chaos of appearances and takes them out of their original context. By enlarging the selected photographs, the depicted-often fragmentary-things take on a strange, enchanted, enigmatic life of their own, whereby they are removed from the unlimited richness of material phenomena.
