Turin is already a permanent city of photography. Even if he hasn’t fully declared it yet. But there are many places where, for a long time, a tradition of important photographic exhibitions that deal with both history and contemporaneity has been consolidated, from Camera to Gallerie d’Italia. Until the new Exposed festival, this year’s first edition. Another place that marks time is Phos. Founded in 2011, it has recently changed location and offers, until May 20, an exhibition with historical and contemporary names that tell its story.
In almost 15 years, this photography center has written its curriculum with around 60 exhibitions of authors whose works are now hanging on the walls of the new space in via Lanza. The story of a gallery told with the images to which it has given voice is truly a strong point: the variety of perspectives and research expressed in the works now exhibited in the new headquarters in Flashback Habitat (the new center for contemporary art in Turin), offers the opportunity to take stock of new art photography. Which also dialogues with the “old” one: a self-portrait of Mario Crescia path in a forest of Luigi Ghirrian architectural work by Mario Giacomelli and even some 1930s shots of Lisette Modelmaster of street photography.
There are many themes in the images displayed: landscape, environment, animals, suburbs, Arctic, architecture, society, migration. Many means used: analogue, digital, cell phones, collage, post production. And a long list of photographers. Some like Paolo Novelliwith years of analogue work for rigorous black and white, where the printing process is of fundamental importance (already on display at the Triennale and at Massimo Minini, from 14 June to 21 July it will be in the Project room of Camera, with The day after the night). Here it is with a black and white shot of a meadow with a woman in the center. Always regarding the investigations on black and white there is the suggestive and powerful gaze of Michael Ackerman on Dachau; the very contrasting one of Jacob Aue Sobol with a dinghy in the middle of nowhere. The B/W contrasts on the bodies, moving figures on a table set by the young photographer Carola Alemanni.
Nature is one of the protagonists of the exhibition: Federico Masini frames it in relation to the human body, while it becomes the investigation of animals for Ilaria Ferretti who takes the cows to pasture. There is the horse at dusk of Sophia Rehn within the project dedicated to lights as the day fades. Peter Bologna proposes an abstract nature stolen with the cell phone. There are color portraits of Davide De Martis with the characters of cosplayers and those of Steve Panariti taken in the Barriera district of Turin.
How did we choose them? Explains Enzo Obiso, photographer, among the founders of Phos: «We have given a lot of space to young people, we have never placed constraints on the themes and the way of doing photography. Always with the intention of seeing an honesty in the project. Without nostalgia of any kind: everyone uses what they want. As will happen for the photographer Vittorio Sancipriano who created a project on migrants, Christmas on a cruise. Migrations and other remedies. A series of portraits of people after a period of time who had disembarked.” It will open on June 1st.
But Phos has no breaks because it is also a center for residencies, for workshops and courses, laboratories, meetings and much more. A small temple of photography and photography.
