For three days, the 18th edition of the Savignano Immagini Festival transforms a quiet Italian town near Rimini into a hive of cultural activity. The town plays host to free photography exhibitions with sixteen gallery spaces dedicated to broad themes of identity and perception. I visited on the final day, a sunny Sunday afternoon, and while I didn’t get to see everything, I saw enough to give this initiative a massive thumbs up.
Magnum photographer Martin Parr takes a wry and grotesque look on ‘Luxury’ . I recall a book of his photos from 1986 called ‘The Last Resort’ which collected bleak views of the Northern English seaside town of New Brighton. For the show at Savignano he turns his lens to the theme of ‘Luxury’ which you might think would be a more glamorous subject. Instead, his images of the moneyed classes looks every bit as depressing as the working class holidays he captured two decades ago. Proof, as if it were needed, that money alone doesn’t buy style or elegance.
A sharp contrast to Parr’s brash colour shots were those of Italian, Simona Ghizzon. Her ‘Piccole Mani’ (Small hands) presented black and white portraits of female factory workers ( ‘hands’) – a worthy topic but her poorly lit images seemed to emphasise the bleakness of these lives too overtly. I think the show would have benefited from less polemical perspective; a few colour images would have given a broader view.
Another Italian , Simona Vinci, presented words and fairly nondescript scenes from near her home town of Bologna. The photographs were less interesting than the evocative accompanying text about how our souls become at one with places we are familiar.
The most striking images of the afternoon were those of German photographer, Peter Bialobrzeski. It came as no surprise to read afterwards that one of Bialobrzeski’s all time favourite movies is Blade Runner. The living Sci-Fi of a series which he entitles ‘Lost In Transition’ is very evident. He depicts various futuristic cities under construction where the landscapes, homes and businesses they are rapidly replacing are still visible. Rough shacks and ramshackle buildings are juxtaposed with shiny bright tower blocks. These are cities as physical manifestations of the way we visualise progress, showing what is viewed as expendable and outmoded. It doesn’t give much cause for optimism. They testaments to a philosophy where sustainability and human centred environment are either ignored or treated as irrelevant. A portfolio of these extraordinary pictures can be found on Bialobrzeski’s website.
