FOTOGRAFIA in collezione presents 35 works from Rome Commission: the FOTOGRAFIA Festival Internazionale di Roma’s section that, since 2003, commissions to Italian as well as international artists a phographic portrait of the city.
Initiated by Marco Delogu in 2002, the FOTOGRAFIA Festival Internazionale di Roma was conceived as an encounter between contemporary art and Rome’s extraordinary historical heritage. MACRO and FOTOGRAFIA Festival have joined forces because they share an international perspective and a focus on the city and its environs. FOTOGRAFIA in collezione heralds not just the Museum’s acquisition of works by a number of the world’s leading photographers, it marks the start of a close partnership as further acquisitions build what is set to become a unique museum collection.
All of the artists on show have questioned and connected with the city of Rome, its urban and social fabric, and its unique, distinctive, polysemic elements: Rome as a field of enquiry and artistic research, to immortalize situations, scenes and details common and rare, elided or forgotten. Olivo Barbieri offers an airy, almost unreal view of monumental Rome through his “selective focus” photographs of the city from a helicopter; Tim Davis studies the archeology of the recent past, revealing unusual details of modern-day suburbs; and Guy Tillim seeks the Citt‡ di mezzo, the isolation of place, the suspension of an instant, or a particular feeling of freedom.
For these and all of the artists on show, their deliberate time spent working in Rome lies on a continuum that goes all the way back to the heritage of the Grand Tour. In this original encounter, contemporary artists wander the city, informed by their own inner worlds, and deploying their own personal style; they seek to reveal things that we have never seen before, generated by the sum of their own inner workings and the inner workings of the most “pictured” city in history.
Artists on show: Olivo Barbieri; Gregory Crewdson; Rodolfo Fiorenza; Matthew Monteith; Matthew Monteith; Tod Papageorge; Anders Petersen; Alec Soth; David Spero; Guy Tillim; Paolo Ventura; Jeff Wall; unknown photographer.