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CITIES 11 Colofon
SHADES OF LIFE
Nancy A. Scherl - Dining alone
Sakulchai Sikitikul - life explore soul
Jonathan Jasberg - A beautiful thing is never perfect
Sergio Perez - a fera 'ô luni
Max Sturgeon - All The Things That Could Happen Next
Roberto Polillo - Milan Souls
OUT OF TOWN
Rebecca Wiltshire - It's Iconic
Andrea Bettancini - Sundek
Anna Zemella - A Fusina
Federico Arcangeli - A few little things
WORLD PICS from TTA 2022 on CITIES 11
photos by Luigi Alloni, Giuseppe Bartuccio, Alessandra Bearzatto, Anna Rita Carrisi, Silvia Casali, Samuele Dall'Asta, Prashina Figuereido, Paola Fusani, Michel Guillaume, Ahamed Jaman Jehad, Usama Khan, Edmund Kurenia, Luca Maiorano, Roberto Malagoli, Alessandro Malaguti, Milena Masini, Francesco Munaro, Lara Ongaro, Barbara Orienti, Marco Parenti, Pia Parolin, Laura Pierangeli, Francesca Romana Semerano, Ettore Simonetti, Roberta Vagliani, Svetlin Yosifov.
a certain view of the world
CITIES has revealed since the first releases that it did not intend to crystallize into rigid and immutable formats over time, making an identity choice consistent with the reasons for its foundation, to be traced in the desire to offer a contribution to the renewal of the language of street and urban Photography.
Together with the recognition of the existing, many of our proposals intend to be a stimulus, sometimes even provocative, to experiment with new expressiveness that allow to make permeable those genre boundaries, now narrow, which risk the repetition of idle mannerisms.
So the layout of this magazine becomes a metaphor for the need to become mobile like those languages, and after a celebratory issue like 10, an important goal for a challenge that seemed unlikely to think of it, CITIES changes once again.
Unlike the previous geographical subdivision, in this issue you will find two large sections, "Shades of Life", and "Out of Town", which make explicit more clearly the conceptual idea underlying the proposals of the latest issues, when from time to time we have asked ourselves a series of questions about the nature of this genre.
If street or urban is the code with which we define a way of looking at the world, of grasping it and reporting it, there is no doubt that we are referring to an approach, rather than an outcome; This is to say that it is not the place of action that defines genre, although it conventionally gives it the name.
And that therefore this approach can be detected wherever a human activity is manifested, understood as action or anthropization. Even on a holiday boat with Vanzine tones, in one of those days at the beach sung by Paolo Conte, by "dips in the sea,
Or perhaps, as Federico Arcangeli seems to suggest with his little things that recall the suspended atmosphere of Arudhati Roy's God, rather than a literal out-of-town or an escape from the ordinary everyday, "Out of Town" can also be a category of feeling. A category characterized by the search for those projections of our interiority that we can recognize as landscapes of the soul.
Which do not appear conceptually very different from the landscapes of Max Sturgeon, chronicle of the hardest period of the COVID 19 pandemic, echoing the fracture in space-time of a novel by Murakami, with the protagonist immersed, as in these photos, in the darkness of an emotional bewilderment.
It is evident how space, urban or not, more than a geolocalizing backdrop, caught in its interactions with the human presence by a photographic vision, appears in these works as a narrative element shaped by an introspective look: an example of how even the landscape can change depending on our mood.
On the other hand, the chaos in which Roberto Polillo immerses us is different, whose shooting technique returns (ICM), through the blur, the incessant movement that characterizes the city. In this way, dreamlike visions materialize that still retain an identity recognizability through the iconic fragments that punctuate the narrative rhythm, oriented in this case to reveal the latent genius loci of the places.
As with every issue of CITIES, these proposals more open to dialectical comparison are accompanied by more classic works, including "Dining alone. In The Company of Solitude", a series in which Nancy Scherl has collected 76 photos taken over 35 years, tracing a path that shows how the perception of what was once considered a stigma has changed over the years. Another work with a strong sociological imprint, therefore, which confirms the scope of the perspectives capable of giving this photograph a wider breadth.
If some of our proposals suggest that everyday life is an experiential journey, where each of us, as Nietzsche recalled, can only feel like a wanderer, then there are the "physical" journeys, those that move in space, to the exploration of other cultures and realities; and this issue closes with a section dedicated to images from the 2022 edition of the TTA, the Travel Tales Award of which CITIES is a partner.
Another novelty of this issue is the arrival of the new photo-editor, Fabiola Di Maggio, to whom we address our welcome and best wishes for good work, thanking Graziano Perotti for the precious contribution of these years.
Attilio Lauria
