Work through the Lens

Abstract

FOTOGRAFIA: Rome International Photography Festival September 20-October 28, 2012 Rome's international photography festival. FOTOGRAFIA, recently hosted a rich agenda of events centered on the timely theme of Work. In this eleventh edition, the sprawling attraction gathered more than two thousand photographs by roughly 180 photographers from across the world in over sixty exhibitions. The main site was at MACRO Testaccio, one of two locations that make up Rome's contemporary art muscum in the south central part of the city, with a myriad of participating galleries and institutes front across Rome. This year's theme while clearly inspired by the ongoing economic crisis applied in varying degree to the exhibits that make up the festival, directed by MACRO photography curator MACRO Dclogu. The windowless, uninterrupted spaces at MACR0 Testaccio a slaughterhouse until 1975 played host to Camera work, a group exhibition of color and black-and-white photographs by ten international artists. As suggested by the title, a direct homage to Alfred Stieglitz's magazine, the show addressed the ways work has changed in the West in the course of the twentieth century, mainly from manufacturing to service economies. At the same time, viewers were confronted with how the photographic representation of this metamorphosis has mutated. Classic works by Chris Killip, Josef Koudelka, and Don McCullin document traditional work like mining and fishing, while Lars Tunbjork's and Florian van Rockers photographs reveal how alienating and depersonalizing offices and desk work can be. I mondi dei lavoti perduti (The Worlds of the Lost Jobs) was a series of photographs or pearl fisherwomen of the Ama group in Japan, taken first near the beginning or their careers in the 1950s by anthropologist and photographer Fosco Maraini, and then again in 2010 by. Nina Poppe. Maraini's pictures show the women, without the aid of oxygen tanks, diving deep bencath the surface with nothing more than a dagger strapped to a loincloth. In Poppe's photos, taken over fifty years later, the same women are still keeping up the craft, albeit with advanced equipment, because a new generation or pearl divers has not risen up to replace them. The festival also devoted space to the Italian photography scene. In it Paese e renle (The Nation is Real), curator and photographer Alessandro Dandini de Sylva selected pictures that don't necessarily refer, at first glance, to specific personal stories of job loss. Rather, it traced an atmosphere of uncertainty and instability regarding the future, nuanced with hope for a positive change desPite the difficulties of circumstances and a feeling of immobility. One photograph, Vada a bordo, cazzo! (Get on board, damn it!. 2012) by Lorenzo Durantini, stands out from the rest. It illustrates the half-sunken carcass of the Costa Concordia cruise liner, which capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio in January 2012, killing thirty-two people in italy's worst maritime disaster since world war II. The title, lifted from a leaked audio conversation, quotes a coast guard captain ordering the commander of the sinking ship to get back on board and help with the evacuation. The story electrified Italian society with its parable-like hero and villain one consumed with professional and ethical responsibility, the other with cowardice and dereliction of duty. In another MACRO Testaccio pavilion, curators Paul Wombell. Mare Prust, and Valentina Tanni nominated through an international competition in 2010 explored photography's relationships with contemporary art, publishing, and new media respectively. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the exhibition Field, Wombell gathered three productions that are each related to farmland. While Jackie Nickerson's portraits of farmers in southern Africa recall the language of the depression-era Farm Security Administration photographers, Mishka Henner's project. …