Booksigning and book presentation Sunday 20th of October 16.00

Published by Around Gallery, the photographic project Portraits of a Land, is a merger of investigative journalism and professional development that presents a meditation on the iconographic simplification and distortion that often emerges from the media coverage of current events.

The subject of the present work is the State of Israel, one of the hottest arenas in the world: a country contended, multi-ethnic and at the centre of controversial political dynamics, both internal and international.

Milo Sciaky offers the spectator a visual journey, organized into a contemplative series of landscapes and views, that is set as “nemesis” of the way ideologies (on both sides) use the supposed peculiarity of photography to record the reality, pervading the process of individual knowledge, with the intent to influence the judgment over a topic.

The author decided therefore to approach the subject looking at its original element, the Land, portraying it as it appeared during the course of his journey travelling from East to West, from North to South; with its towns, villages, forests, and deserts. The aim is to render through photographs simply what the land itself tries to communicate, confident that something always happens, even when it seems that nothing is happening in the quiet landscape.

The point of view of Portraits of a Land is precisely the one of the Land, which Sandro Iovine, in the introduction to the volume, defines as: “The land in its essence is a pure place, one without flags or men infesting it, or claiming dominance. It is a silent reality, independent of the will of its inhabitants. The land only asks to be understood. We have the opportunity to appreciate its outer essence through the landscape, empathizing with its physical places, through which we may retrieve the meaning of its own material and spiritual self.”

Only at the end of this trip, in the concluding page of the book, the central message of this work becomes finally clear and disconcerting: when the explorer is looking at the lush green tree that appears in the cover of the book and realizes that if he walks just a few steps backward, he can see that it grew on a minefield along the Syrian border. So, how should we interpret what we see? What should we think about the ideas that we develop through the images created by others or the words written by someone else? How can we defend ourselves from the distortions of the messages presented by the media?

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