photography
“I like Italo Calvino’s idea of ‘continuous cities,’ as described in ‘Invisible Cities.’ He suggests that there is actually just one big, continuous city that does not begin or end: ‘Only the name of the airport changes.’ What is then interesting is to find, in that continuity, the less-obvious differences of texture: the signs, the markings, the assemblages, the things hiding in plain sight in each cityscape or landscape.
‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?’ But to have merely thought of here would not have revealed its subtle peculiarities, the peculiarities that are not written in guidebooks. Only direct observation can reveal those. The way streetlights and traffic signs vary, the most common fonts, the slight variations in building codes, the fleeting culture of ads (different in each place, even when the company is a multinational), the noticeable shift in the range of hues that people wear in a given city, the visual melody of infrastructure as it interacts with terrain.”
—from “Far Away from Here,” The New York Times Magazine
I wrote On Photography, a monthly column in the New York Times Magazine, between 2015 and 2019. The column was a 2016 finalist for a National Magazine Award.
Blind Spot was published by Random House in June 2017. The accompanying solo exhibition, Blind Spot and Black Paper, was held at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City in the summer of 2017. My debut solo exhibition, Punto d’Ombra, was presented in Milan in 2016; the accompanying book (Italian edition of Blind Spot) was published by Contrasto. The Blind Spot exhibition has subsequently been presented at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Strauhof in Zürich, Switzerland, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum in Lexington, Kentucky, among others.
Black Paper, a solo performance with multimedia installation, was commissioned by the 2017 Performa Biennial and presented in New York City in November 2017. The New York Times described it as “quietly grave” and “thoroughly devastating.” A book of the same title—dealing with a different constellation of materials—was published in late 2021.
Fernweh, a book of photographs, was published in a fine edition by MACK Books in February 2020. There’s a long interview about the book on American Suburb X. Fernweh sold out its print run, and only rare copies are now available.
Golden Apple of the Sun, a work of photography and text, was published by MACK in July 2021. I discussed the book on Artnet News.
Exhibitions in 2022 included Blind Spot at the Contemporary Dayton and Fernweh at Images Vevey, Switzerland.
Pharmakon, a work of photography and text, will be published by MACK in February 2024.