The main exhibition of the first PhC was the collective show entitled “Just Around the Corner”, which brought together 40 works by international photographers and focused on a more intimate and familiar type of photography. It examined the moments in which a photographer dwells on something familiar he sees all the time, when he narrows his gaze to take in what revolves around his own home, land and family. In short, it investigated the occasions when photography no longer needs the “extraordinary” but the fantastic and profound “ordinariness” of personal and everyday life
Photographers who have travelled the globe seeking inspiration in faraway people or settings, thus creating the identity of their photographic language, feel the need to return to taking pictures of nature and the landscape “just around the corner” from their own home. Everything started more than a decade ago when I saw Don McCullin’s exhibition at the Hamilton Gallery in London, with his landscapes of Somerset, the countryside where he went to live after witnessing wars around the world. From there, the idea remained in my head and continued to development as I observed photographers who most recent series move in this direction, like my own works on nature. It is about habitual solitude with nature and the constant observation of the ordinary. Many people experience something similar: for example, there are the cactuses and gardens, near and far, of Graciela Iturbide and the families of Bernard Plossu and George Tatge. Guy Tillim photographs the beach in front of his house. Tim Davis and Luca Campigotto, photographers and poets, observe trees, meadows and glaciers in profoundly different ways. Matthew Monteith portrays his parents and the things next door. And we have Andrea Botto with the grotto of Tenerano, the memory of childhood in Lunigiana, Leonie Purchas who – after probing families around the world – went to her mother’s house and decided to work there for years, and Caterina Saban with her views of the Tuscan landscape as a way of rediscovering her identity. What do these photographers have in common? The desire to work on their interior world, to be astonished without astonishing, to be moved by very little that is actually a great deal.
In addition to the important collective show, on each of the six weekends of the festival an exhibition is inaugurated with the works of young Italian photographers, called upon to investigate the territory of the Maremma area in Tuscany, with subjects such as “the lands” that will be crossed by the new motorway, the landscapes of the island of Giannutri, a collective exhibition on the SS1 Aurelia road between Rome and Capalbio, and a work created by five historic immigrants in Capalbio, who illustrate their daily lives through pictures.