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Defamiliarization with wide angle
The photographs were taken in South Tyrol,
a region in northern Italy on the border with Austria, where there are three
language groups: the Italian, German and Ladin language groups.
It is the city where I was born and grew up, so it is a familiar place and, like any known place, it is difficult to look at it with new eyes.
Luigi Ghirri, for example, a famous Italian photographer had based his photographic poetics on apparently banal places, near the house,
trying to renew a look at familiar things, already seen but for the first time "looked at" with different eyes.
The images show the landscape of the city and its surroundings and are the result of a process that led me to think about the places and environments that people create
and live. I asked myself: "Is there an identity that connects the landscape and the people? What kind of relationship exists between the two? Is there a form of dentification"?
These are the questions from which I begin to tell a story about a place, trying to discover its genius loci.
I always try to include the human figure for this very reason, and even when there is not, the presence is still tangible because the landscape is often a cultural landscape. In the
places that I photograph I try to map the territory through some recurrent elements: the streets, the squares, the people in contact with nature, with a look tied to the
marginal, to the small things. My research begins with landscapes because places are always inside landscapes before being outside. They can also be called mental landscapes,
underlining the relationship between emotional landscape and external landscape.
I shot in November, in full autumn
light, when nature changes its colors
and the light becomes softer.
The light at this time of year is very interesting, it is a changing light: no longer summer, but not yet winter.
Bolzano is a city surrounded by hills and mountains and this makes the passage of the seasons much more visible, it is also a small city, which is good for cycling so it can have a more natural standard of living than those who live in a big city, with all the associated limitations of course!
The city landscape is composed of vineyards, apple orchards and trees in the
various gardens. The trees are colored in various shades, from vibrant reds to the
yellow of the vineyards. Here, the autumn light takes the place of the summer one.
It was a challenge to photograph due to the wide angle. I usually use a 24-70 with autofocus but photographing with a 14 mm led me to change a lot of perspective. It was interesting to change the way of seeing because with such a wide view there are so many things that can be captured. Even framing becomes a way to observe things in a slower, more careful way.
Taking pictures with a wide angle as high as 14mm gives you the opportunity to bring many things into the frame; suddenly the world becomes so large. You also find yourself thinking by subtraction and asking: what should I remove from the image? How close do I have to get to let in what I want? To make the image as ordered as possible?
Claudia Corrent (b. in 1980) is a freelance photographer based in Bolzano, Italy. After graduating from Philosophy at the University of Trento, she approached photography through several workshops and courses: “Visual Urban photography” by Francesco Jodice in (2007), “Photojournalism” by Parallelo Zero (2013). Through a masterclass with Simon Robert in Venice (2014), in 2015 she participated in a master-class at the Fabrica (Treviso) and she was selected to participate in a residency sponsored by Camera (Turin) with Henry Gruyar. She was awarded with the "Prix Festival City Enterprise 1000 Talents of Venezie", (Vicenza) and her work was exhibited in San Francesco, Russia, Lithuanian, Milan, Rome, Lucca, Bolzano, Venice, Genoa, Monopoli, and Lecce. Her images have been published in Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Gioia, Courrier International, and online in National Geographic, Il Post, Vanity Fair. She’s interested in storytelling especially related to anthropological and social issues and the relationship between people and the environment. She is represented by LUZphoto. claudiacorrent.carbonmade.com