Grand Tour
The journey through time of iPhoneography
Giuliano Ferrari presents his research on the theme of the Grand Tour, the long journey through Italy undertaken in the past to become educated about antiquity, Renaissance painting, and the landscape.
His journey, as well, had a long duration – both temporal and conceptual – because it was the result of many years of experience in photojournalism and represents a response to the technological modification of photography. In fact, the project comprises digital photographs taken with an iPhone with limited post-production, examining the metamorphosis in the social use of photography with this device that has become so familiar to everyone, even those who have never used a regular camera.
In this way, Ferrari’s journey is no longer an itinerary within a geographical and historical setting but a journey inside himself in search of his own cognitive and emotional roots; it is an attempt to recompose into a unity the fragments of experiences accumulated over time, and a reflection on his own capacity to create a long narrative. It proceeds primarily in a dual manner, by images facing each other and interconnected by variable links: topographic, temporal, visual, mnemonic, or psychological. In this way his story is situated on a new step in the history of photography, which is no longer “writing with light” but has become the “re-imagining” of reality, or its interpretation via the digital image.
Massimo Mussini
