This publication shows works by more than 30 artists which take their inspiration from the influential film Il deserto rosso by Michelangelo Antonioni. As a director he has had a wide-reaching influence on photographers, visual artists, and filmmakers internationally. The movie is one of his most important works and is highly esteemed for its coloration.
The artists participating in the project are associated with the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig as well as with the photography initiatives Linea di Confine in Rubiera and Osservatorio Fotografico in Ravenna. In 2013 the first artists taking part in the project took to the industrial surroundings of the northern Italian landscape, especially around Ravenna, in search of traces for the purpose of approaching Antonioni’s artistic, visually complex mindscape, not least the atmosphere of the 1960s, from today’s point of view. Il deserto rosso was the first film in which Antonioni discovered color as a multi-layered aesthetic element. Thus the series being presented reflect color as a creative, corresponding and symbolic picture material.
The aesthetic examination of color-related elements plays a major role and is explored with respect to their effect and their symbolic or realistic content. A further focus of the exhibits that were produced is the question concerning narrative perspectives and how they can be expressed by means of the media-related possibilities of photography and film. Such questions have been involved in the making of the book: during the print process the magenta has been replaced with a pantone red ink.
Participating artists:
Fabrizio Albertini, Mariano Andreani, Daniele Ansidei, Jakob Argauer, Daniel Augschöll/Anya Jasbar, Enrico Benvenuti, Joachim Brohm, Christoph Brückner, Luca Capuano, Danny Degner/Vera König, Eva Dittrich/Katarína Dubovská, Alessandra Dragoni, Johannes Ernst, Marcello Galvani, João Grama, William Guerrieri, Guido Guidi, Gerry Johansson, Sophia Kesting, Philipp Kurzhals, Dana Lorenz, Allegra Martin, Mako Mizobuchi, Francesco Neri, Andrea Pertoldeo, Sabrina Ragucci/Giorgio Falco, Alexander Rosenkranz, Valentina Seidel, Anna Voswinckel, Jakob Wierzba, Xiaoxiao Xu.
Edited by
Joachim Brohm and Anna Voswinckel
Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig/Academy of Fine Art
in collaboration with
Gabriele Conrath-Scholl and Claudia Schubert, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
and Silvia Loddo and Cesare Fabbri, osservatorio fotografico, Ravenna
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Published by Osservatorio Fotografico, 167 pgs, 30 × 23 cm, Softcover, 2017, 978-3-902993-46-5