Artist
Leonardo Magrelli
Leonardo Magrelli (1989) lives and works in Rome. After studying Design first and Art History later, he began working as a graphic and book designer.
A certain openness to manipulation and reuse of images, inherent in the graphic design work, as well as a particular attention to project and research, rather than instinctuality alone, are characteristics that remain visible in the author's practice even after converting to photography. The awareness of images’ hybrid and ambiguous nature is in fact a constant subtext of his work, which varies from time to time between a more conceptual approach to photography and a more descriptive and documentary one, often mixing the two. Alongside his personal research, he collaborates with the collective Vaste Programme, founded with Giulia Vigna and Alessandro Tini in 2017, to experiment with post-photography, installations and new media.
West of Here
All the images in this work are taken in Grand Theft Auto V —a video game set in Los Santos, an “open world” scenario that closely resembles Los Angeles and its surroundings. Turned into a virtual replica, the city looks familiar and recognizable, but at the same time, pieces are missing, distances are altered, dimensions changed.
Instead of photographing directly “in-game”, all the images are originally taken by different players around the world, to further shed a light on the ubiquitous proliferation of photography and to create a single narrative out of a “collective memory” of a place that doesn’t exist. While exploring the possibilities and the meanings of photographing a virtual place, the work also addresses the truthfulness of photography and our belief in this medium as a trace of reality.
Collected from the web, edited, cropped and turned to black and white by the author, the images lose their virtual evidence and blur the distinction between false and real. To some, these pictures may resemble those of many great photographers who worked in L.A. widely throughout the second half of the past century. With their own perspective, these artists all contributed to the creation of an image of the city that is still vivid and lasting.