The artists selected for FUTURES this year were identified by Walter Guadagnini, artistic director of CAMERA, and Giangavino Pazzola, associate curator of the centre and coordinator of the programme, with the help of curator and founder of Leporello photobooks, Chiara Capodici, founder of the Turin-based Witty Books Tommaso Parrillo, and Giulia Pollicita, researcher and curator of the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples. The sampling the evaluation of portfolios of native Italian artists both in the country or abroad, and also of those coming from different nationalities but actively operating in the Italian context. This year, CAMERA also had a desire to investigate how new documentary strategies are evolving in our context, and all these nominated photographers make use of the documentary register to overcome a crisis in our perception of images.

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The 2023 selection of CAMERA-FUTURES artists considers the contextual dynamics that characterise the Italian art scene from two different points of view: structural and artistic. The lack of public funds and programs to support young and mid-career artists who work with the photographic medium is a starting point for tracing the perimeter of our observation. Then, from a methodological point of view, we have directed the research within the national artistic scenario, analysing the works of national and international artists currently based and active in our country.

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The selected artists were those who most explored the technological, linguistic and poetic evolutions of the photographic medium. In this sense, the six cases identified constitute a cross-section that tells some of the most recent aesthetic trends in the field of contemporary image-making in Italy. The research of these artists describes the nature of a partial and continuously transitioning medium using cameras, VR, AI and other tools to generate images and stories. Photography for them has an expanded and hybrid meaning that often highlights repeated interactions with textual, performative and physical aspects.

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Deeply rooted in the Italian photographic tradition, their research renews the ways of narrating two of the main recurring themes in photography from our country: landscape and society. This selection not only highlights the evolution of documentary towards a photography that emerges from the confirmation of the existing, but also towards one that engages more creative and symbolic registers in the invention of possible imaginaries. Their photography is an act of visual deconstruction of space, values and meaning of contemporary times.

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In short, our selection is linked to photographic art in the Italian context, chosen through a democratic process, and furthermore, it is inclusive in the desire to keep documentary registers together with other, more experimental ones.

The CAMERA project is rooted in the desire to provide Italy with a specialised centre dedicated to photography as a form of language, documentation and artistic expression – with the aim of promoting Italian photography in a permanent, creative dialogue with international experiences.

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Through studies, experimentation and activities around photography, CAMERA’s cultural offerings aim to stimulate comparison, raise questions and investigate the narration of reality through imagery. The language of photopraphy is thus studied to the last detail, and the results are displayed without making exceptions for genre or function. CAMERA promotes an international network of both individuals and institutions, whose collaboration is aimed at developing new projects, and in bringing the experience and potential of photography to a broad audience.

CAMERA Italian Centre for Photography is a cultural foundation located in Turin and completely dedicated to photography. Positioned in the city center, very close to
the Mole Antonelliana, the Po River and the Museo Egizio, it is firstly an exhibition space of almost 2000m2 for Italian and international photography and visual culture. The 2021 exhibition programme has been organised according to two main fields of research: established artists and historical shows have been hosted in the main spaces, while mid-career and young talents ideas and exhibitions in our project room.

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At the same time, CAMERA operates in the educational field with workshops, summer schools, talks and activities addressed to different audiences interested in photography. Another important field of research is related to private and public photography archives, who are in the middle of our attention through conservation and valorisation practices. Started from the autumn of 2015, CAMERA is a platform for display, production, archiving, training, meeting, and debate all around photography.

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Related to the criteria for the selection of our 2021 artists included in the Futures programme, we decided to adopt an inclusive approach to mainly represent the greatest number of possibilities and variations of photography practice today. The starting point in this situation has been practical: what does photography mean today in the Italian context? How can we disseminate new trends, aesthetics, and topics to Italian cultural scenario?

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From the linguistic point of view, our selection ranges from an approach deeply grounded in investigating social and cultural issues through a register of reporting matrix to another more characterised by a performative influence. In this way, we underline how they often mix different typologies of sources: not only digital and analogical own made materials, but also scientifical, manipulated, archival, downloaded images and so on are used to build new narratives about the contemporary.
At the same time, with their project, our talents can question the role of photography today and the perception (and modification) of society through it. Mixing bidimensional images with videos, installations, projections, books, and written texts they offer a complex and multifaceted world in which different interpretations take shape.

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From the thematic point of view, our talents investigate a kind of aesthetic of trauma and catastrophes focusing their attention and sensibility on issues related to the main challenges in contemporary times: ecology and disasters, social and personal interactions, inequalities and decolonisation, our relationship with history and fictional aspects. More than a self-referential and formal dissertation about technique and forms in photographic field, their projects and research seem to be part of a kind of huge collective discourse about self-determination and emancipation in which they take active part lighting up some corner with their point of view.

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Text by Giangavino Pazzola
- Curator