The 8th edition of Fotografia Europea, the yearly international event devoted to photography, is about to start; the countdown has reached its end and Reggio Emilia is ready to welcome Italian and foreign visitors for the long opening weekend from 3rd to 6th of May 2013. As each year, the festival hosts numerous qualified workshops and encounters with artists and professionals in the field, who will be asked to talk about the main theme: To Change. Photography and Responsibility, divided in four sub-issues: surprise, faith, estrangement, vision.
Among the people invited to exchange their point of views we count the writers Tiziano Scarpa and Dževad Karahasan, the biologist Yael Lubin and the artist Tomàs Saraceno. With a multidirectional approach, Fotografia Europea presents a wide range of photo exhibitions scattered around the beautiful, historical, and sometimes unknown, locations offered by the city. Palazzo Magnani proposes the show entitled Murder is my business with pictures by Weegee – pen name of Arthur Fellig – one of the most famous photo reporters of the ‘40s in New York; At Chiostri di San Pietro you’ll be spoilt for choice: from Anders Petersen’s reportage of the earthquake that hit the area in 2012 (exhibition curated by Studio Blanco in collaboration with Slamjam) to David Stewart’s Stuff that focuses on the eccentricity of people, and to Andrea Galvani’s Higgs Ocean, curated by Marinella Paderni, which reflects on the natural energy transfer with the artist’s typical poetic approach.
The list is too long and could go on and on, but we cannot avoid closing this overview talking about the first Italian solo show by Peter Sutherland (b. 1976, Ann Arbor, Michigan), entitled Too Young To Care, coming from the collaboration between WONDER ROOM and Studio Blanco, which will be hosted by Spallanzani’s Collection (Musei Civici, Via Spallanzani 1, in the city centre). The American photographer will present a series of unreleased images and archive works that retrace a both intimate and evocative artistic path.
“I have been taking pictures since about 2002.” Sutherland told us. “Around this time my father passed away and photography was a place to focus my energy to, and avoid thinking about that part of me that was lost. I wanted to photograph everything I knew as a child. I did this over the following few years, and it became the backbone for everything else I would do. I have never wanted to control situations or carry a heavy camera, I just want to enjoy what I’m doing and get some poetic images along the journey. I want to go out and explore. I have always been interested in youth cultures because they give kids a chance to express themselves. I grew up skating and snowboarding, and learned so much at a young age from taking part – I was born at a good time, when I started skateboarding, no one had done a “kick flip” yet… -, but things are different today, everything is global and it’s all about the Internet and digital sharing of information.
He explained us how he liked the change: “It inspired me to evolve creatively, making films, installations and then back to photography. I take cellphone photos, do all the social media stuff and appreciate the way it is changing and speeding up trends and the way images behave/exist in the world in general. As for responsibility, we are reconsidering what that is. Once I was listening to John Baldessari being interviewed in an old episode of Art21. He was saying that he doesn’t think images should be owned. He thinks that would be like owning words and wouldn’t make sense. I think I agree with him: if you are uploading images, you are sharing them and you loose control over what happens to them.
I am very interested in things that happen because of photos, not who owns them. In 2006 I took a photo of a deer drinking out of a storm drain in the city. This photo became the cover of a Korean magazine, four years later a beautiful girl wrote to me on Facebook and told me she really liked this picture, she was living in Nepal. In 2010 I visited Nepal, 3 years later we were married in Kathmandu. Keep shooting photos, you never know!”
The exhibition will run until June 16, 2013.
Monica Lombardi – Images Peter Sutherland
