“In Magenta” is a series I completed in February 2021. I’ve been trying through the use of a flash off camera and an old reflex to explore my hometown, my neighbours, the beach, where people wander endlessly and dead bodies are carried on the shore, unable to escape. The use of colour is meant to underline the enstrangement between me and what I once called home following the Corona Virus pandemic and the global lockdown.
Born and raised near Tuscany’s sea, I have always been attracted to storytelling and fine arts. My interest in cinema and photography developed thanks to the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Michelangelo Antonioni, Benoit Paille, Bruce Gilden and Edward Steichen, who deeply inspire me as many other authors and media do. Eager to learn how to be a director and to find my narrative style, I started my studies at Scuola Holden, a storytelling academy in Turin, where I completed my studies in Cinema. Thanks to this experience I had the opportunity to improve technically and to work on various personal projects in different medias. I finished my studies in 2020. It was at this moment in life when I found interest in off camera flash street photography. Now I am studying Modern Italian Literature in Università di Pisa, but I am still working on new projects in different medias, trying to improve more and more, both on a technical level and on a poetic one.
Water and wind are recurrent elements that appear in the works I’ve done, as they are and always will be a part of me.
During this last apocalyptic year I’ve been wandering around, armed with a reflex and a cheap flash. I stopped strangers and talked with them for a while. We were in a stage of knowing each other, yet there was a kind of tension. We were feeling creeped out one of the other. What was the other thinking? How were they going to react?
In their uneasiness I recognize myself, yet I don’t know why.
It seems important to me to describe this ordinary feeling of uncanny, is it a feeling born during the pandemic or have neighbours always felt this way one about the other?
David Gibson (1957) is a British street photographer and writer on photography. He was a member of the UP Photographers street photography collective.
Gibson’s books include The Street Photographer’s Manual (2014) and 100 Great Street Photographs(2017) / Street Photography: a History in 100 Iconic Images (2019). His photography has been published in a number of survey publications on street photography, and exhibited in group exhibitions in Britain (including at the Museum of London, which acquired his work for its permanent collection), at the Museum of the City of New York, and in France, Bangkok and Stockholm.
Italian Street Photography Festival
Andrea Bruce is an award winning documentary photographer whose work focuses on people living in the aftermath of war. She concentrates on the social issues that are sometimes ignored and often ignited in war’s wake. Her clients include National Geographic and The New York Times as well as many publications around the globe. Andrea was a 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University where she studied political theory and democracy. Andrea started working in Iraq in 2003, bringing a local reporter’s knack for intimacy and community focus to the lives of Iraqis and the US military. For over ten years she has chronicled the world’s most troubled areas, focusing on Iraq and Afghanistan. For eight years she worked as a staff photographer for The Washington Post, where she originated and authored a weekly column called “Unseen Iraq.”
David Campany is a writer, curator and artist, working mainly with photography.
This website is an archive of David’s published writings, with information about curatorial projects.
His books include A Handful of Dust (2015), The Open Road: photographic road trips across America (2014), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014), Gasoline (2013), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2010), Photography and Cinema (2008) and Art and Photography (2003). He also writes for Frieze, Aperture, Art Review, FOAM, Source, Photoworks and Tate magazine.
Recent curatorial projects include Dust (Le Bal, Paris, 2015) Walker Evans: anonymous (Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France, 2015), Lewis Baltz: Common Objects (Le Bal, Paris 2014), Victor Burgin: A Sense of Place (AmbikaP3 London, 2013), Mark Neville: Deeds Not Words (The Photographers’ Gallery London, 2013) and Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film (Le Bal Paris, 2010).
David has a Phd and teaches at the University of Westminster, London.
Anna Godfrey is the London-based Commissioning Editor for Prestel, the international arts publishing house. Prestel publishes award-winning books on photography, art, architecture, design and fashion. These include best-selling street photography titles such as, ‘100 Great Street Photographs’ (2017), ‘Street Photography: A History in 100 Iconic Photographs’ (2019) and Anna’s recent project, ‘Women Street Photographers’ (2021); the first book on women street photographers which collates the work of 100 contemporary women to explore the intersection of public space, photography, gender and power. Anna’s publications have been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, i-D and many more.
Nikos Economopoulos was born in the Peloponnese, Greece. He studied law in Parma, Italy, and worked as a journalist. In 1988, he started photographing in Greece and Turkey, and eventually abandoned journalism to dedicate himself to photography.
He joined Magnum in 1990, and his photographs began appearing in newspapers and magazines around the world.
In the same period, he started traveling and photographing extensively around the Balkans. The work in the Balkans won him the Mother Jones Award (San Francisco, CA) for work in progress. Upon the completion of his Balkans project in 1994, he became a full member of Magnum. His book In The Balkans was published in 1995 in New York (Abrams) and in Athens (Libro).
Masoud Gharaei was born in March 1988, he is a photographer. He is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes. He is also the founder of Street Photographers foundation.