Parallel Lines: Alessandro Curti
© Giacomo Infantino
Federica Belli The language of photography is still among the most contemporary ones, notwithstanding the diffusion of digital art. Which factors make photography such a relevant medium in our time?
Alessandro Curti The vast dissemination of photography is a fundamental point. We are shown photographs everyday, independently of our will and almost constantly. Moreover, photography is characterised by an immediate ease of understanding. Although silent, a photograph conveys information and contains many words. Delving into a more specific discussion of the accessibility of photography, one could say it is a thoroughly democratic language. Learning to be a good photographer in technical terms simply requires some time, as there are so many courses available. Just like rap music, just like writing, photography now requires almost exclusively ideas to be shared, given the ease of learning to master the medium.
F.B. Precisely for this reason it becomes more and more complex to tell apart an author from a technician. In addition to your Curatorial practice, you work as Contributor at Rolling Stone. Thus you have interviewed many young talented photographers, in a time in which photography is accessible to all. Which traits and peculiarities make an author stand out from the crowd?
A.C. The fundamental difference is that while anyone can master the technicalities of photography, only a few get to be good authors. The author is one who manages to tell a story by giving a unique perspective, a unique side of the story. A tendency I have noticed in contemporary photography, especially among young emerging photographers, is the intimate and personal cut given to projects. There is an increasingly common tendency towards research on oneself, as if all the stories in the world had been told–which is obviously not true. Thus the photographers, in an attempt to give an original taste to the story, narrate their own story as a unique and non-replicable one. One works on one's personal history, one’s family, one’s trauma. But working on oneself does not necessarily make anyone an author. The difference always lies in having a well-defined project in mind, in being able to start a work and embrace a precise direction, bringing the story to a closure. The point is having an awareness of what has been done, what is being done and what has to be done. In addition to having a story to tell, it is necessary to expose it with a successful plan.
© Beatrice Speranza
F.B. Your experience at STILL Young, the section of STILL Milano focused on nurturing young talents in photography, has brought you to commission projects to specific photographers. When assessing which photographer is best suited for tackling a precise assignment, which variables do you value the most?
A.C. STILL Young is dedicated to nurture young talents and work with them, acting as a bridge between artistic production and the commercial industry. We accompany young people through this quite complex photographic community by connecting them to commissioned projects, which bring together companies with creative projects, or by taking them to art fairs. When deciding to organise a Gallery Show or to bring a young photographer to a Fair, I have a very different plan in mind with respect to when I propose an artist for a corporate project. In the first case, the selection method strongly relies on the creativity of the artist. The aim is to amplify the value of the project in order to sell the images and bring them to increasingly important stages. The selection can be made either directly by me or through the launch of open calls through which I collect projects to be valued. In the second case, as I connect a private client to a creative project to be realised–for instance I recently selected a photographer who could properly tell what goes on behind the production chain of a company–I immerse myself in a brainstorming session to identify some profiles to be proposed to the company. Together we then proceed to build the project: I act as the organisational secretary, while the photographer carries out the practical operations. My role is that of filter and bridge, I accompany emerging young artists towards companies that need to express certain messages.
F.B. Being constantly in contact with the authors who will write the future of photography probably brings a lot of reflections on issues that are becoming more and more important. In fact your upcoming book, The Future of Photographic Archives and Digital Memory, is concerned with the consequences of the flooding quantity of images we produce daily. What has brought you to explore specifically this topic?
A.C. The book, published with the publishing house SeiPerSei, is on pre-sale until October 3, date on which it will be released in all major Italian bookstores. Since the publishing house is very attentive to emerging photographers, we agreed on the creation of a product that would meet real contemporary needs. My thought immediately turned to the enormous problem of the archives, since we find ourselves in a peculiar historical moment: while printed physical archives often still need to be digitalised, at the same time we face an opposite emergency. In 2021, archives are created directly in digital form and preserved inside hard disks that contain billions of digital files which must be brought to a physical format, in order to be catalogued and preserved in time. Digital material, if not given a physical presence, risks being forgotten soon. I have also turned to professionals such as artists, curators and archivists, posing them these questions about the need to protect archives in order to avoid digital obsolescence. By relying so much on the digital, we seriously risk not to have a record of our time preserved for the future. We think we can preserve everything in phones and computers, yet softwares evolve faster and faster, with files being continuously lost. Potentially, in 2050 we might not have an iconographic history of our contemporaries, especially in proportion to the huge amount of photographs we produce. A trivial but functional example remains that of the CD-Rom, which at only 40 years of age has become almost unreadable. Many of the extensions in which we store files will not be compatible with the softwares to be used in a few years. If we think of it, iPhone photographs are already saved in HEIC format, which is largely incompatible with other devices. And while there are many ways to solve this problem, unfortunately there is not a single safe one.
© Beatrice Speranza
F.B. While the contemporary issue of money and power being concentrated in fewer and fewer companies has been discussed intensely for the past years, the unregulated distribution of control over our digital memory is still quite overlooked. Which are the most worrying findings of your research on the topic?
A.C. One of the most relevant issues is the attribution of the works: the mere act of printing photographs for newspapers, books and exhibitions allowed at least to put a stamp or a date on the back of a print. And some agencies even pasted their own logos on the photographs. Today, this language translates into metadata: in the digital realm, metadata is compiled by an unbelievably low percentage of photographers. This is a central problem for those who take care of archives, since attribution through visual memories is only possible for so long: without a real passport, many photographs will be lost or not attributed. The photographer behind a photograph, the reason for having taken it and its context is all information that, if not collected immediately, risks being lost. To this regard, with the help of the archivists who digitalised Intesa Sanpaolo's historical archive, I also attempted to guess what might happen in the future regarding the protection of photographic data. The blockchain could be a proper solution in the medium term, since it records and stores information to a certain degree. For now, most experiments occur through projects such as the one carried out by Università Statale di Milano or Intesa Sanpaolo. The goal is to build a universal preservation code, while for now each photographer archives files according to an extremely personal code which is difficult for others to decipher. These record management projects try to give guidelines for archiving that are readable by anyone through the technique of keywording and other tools. These issues that are finally starting to be addressed from different angles.
