ImageNation Venice: Cinematic Visions

On the occasion of the 75th Venice International Film Festival – La Biennale di Venezia, ImageNation, in collaboration with ICI – International Cultural Institute in Venice, is pleased to present “ImageNation Venice: Cinematic Visions”, international photography exhibition held at Il Magazzino del Caffè.

ImageNation meets the cinema to highlight its declinations, focusing on still photography and on cinematic photography, photography inspired by cinema not only in terms of technique but also in terms of its scenographic and emotional capacity. The idea of bringing ImageNation to Venice, responds to the desire to integrate an artistic project of international reach within the context of a city that has always been at the crossroads of cultural exchanges.

Photography for cinema and cinema for photography. Two opposite and complementary paths. From one side, the exhibition presents cinematographic photography and Hollywood celebrities from the 50s until today, and on the other, a selection of images by a new generation of contemporary photographers inspired by the charm of cinema whilst adopting the angles, light techniques and narrative of the so-called “Seventh Art”, as it was defined almost a century ago (Ricciotto Canudo, The Birth of the Seventh Art, 1921), predicting that cinematography would have the potential to combine the extension of space and the dimension of time.

ImageNation Venice sees the participation of some prestigious names in international cinematographic photography, among which Andrew Cooper, still photographer for Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, the Italian photographers Gianni Fiorito and Paolo Ciriello, respectively for directors Paolo Sorrentino and Paolo Virzì, and the French photographer Bruno Calvo, still photographer for the Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movie Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. Among the exhibited works there will also be stars of the golden age of cinema from the Cameraphoto Archive by Carlo Pescatori as well as the Hollywood contemporary celebrities, portrayed by the French photographer Fabrice Dall’Anese, photo reporter for the Cannes festival, the Tribeca Film Festival and Vanity Fair.

In their photographic research, these artists don’t intend to return the representative image of a film or the idea of it, but they try to bring out a further vision that can add or say something more on the universal iconography of the big screen. Shooting cinema, for these artists, is not a matter of documenting but it is a way of leading the viewer to the clear or hidden sense of a moment. Being behind and inside a film means being in balance between reality and fiction, between narrated and reproduced reality. And in the works of these photographers we can read the hybridization between truth and fiction, between lived history and fictional history.

ImageNation Venice: Cinematic Visions
1-16 September 2018
Vernissage, 1st September 6pm

www.imagenationvenice.com