This project is the result of a three-year research on the territory of the city where Alessandro Calabrese lives, Milan. Here, he photographed a variety of realities that, on one hand, identify the city itself and, on the other, they define his experience of the place: from the outskirts to downtown, from the streets to the institutional venues, from the abandoned buildings to the construction sites of the new ones, up to the people he cares about.
As a color-film photographer he has always held with the concept of authorship, approaching reality in a straight way. Intrigued by the potential of the Reverse Image Search (https://youtu.be/t99BfDnBZcI) powered by Google, he got interested in whether and how the digital visual patrimony, boundless and democratic, could fit within a similar attitude. He uploaded his photographs to the most famous search engine: each of them would generate dozens of images to be considered as visually similar, at least according to the standards of similarity of the algorithm located in the application.
As a color-film photographer he has always held with the concept of authorship, approaching reality in a straight way. Intrigued by the potential of the Reverse Image Search (https://youtu.be/t99BfDnBZcI) powered by Google, he got interested in whether and how the digital visual patrimony, boundless and democratic, could fit within a similar attitude. He uploaded his photographs to the most famous search engine: each of them would generate dozens of images to be considered as visually similar, at least according to the standards of similarity of the algorithm located in the application.
Once collected – according to a random selection in terms of quantity and type – all sorts of images he received from the web, Calabrese put aside the original photographs, hiding them within the new body of work, and started to print each of the anonymous files on acetate sheets, always keeping their original download size.
The overlapping of multiple layers, backlit as some kind of multifaceted light box, separated the visually similar images from the original ones, increasingly. All in all, he scanned each group of acetates into one digital image, flattening them and seeing them merge into a new single vision: it was so close to his work, from which it was generated, and still completely unfamiliar. The metamorphosis of his work was finally accomplished. Supported by Foam Amsterdam, Viasaterna and Graziadei Studio legale.
Atelier Neerlandais (Foam Talent Exhibition), Paris, 2015
Macro, Roma, 2017
Macro, Roma, 2017
Gluqbar, 2018
Galleria Civica, Trento, 2019