«Fifteen years of unique, exciting, necessary stories». This is the legitimate mantra of the fifteenth edition of the Ethical Photography Festival in Lodi. And, certainly, among the three adjectives we underline the need for an event that focuses the gaze on the world, giving us small and large stories that have the burdensome and necessary task of telling us about the contemporary world. One of the exhibition venues this year celebrates the first fifteen years of the project by re-proposing the fifteen cover reports. The festival is curated by Progetto Immagine, a photography group from Lodi that had the winning intuition to invent, in a small Italian reality, a kermesse that over time has expanded to the point of involving eleven official locations (including an open-air one in the central square of Montanaso Lombardo), a powerful cluster of sponsors and partnerships (this year also an extra exhibition curated by the Sella Foundation on Vittorio Sella, a master photographer of the mountains who lived around 1900), the entire city territory with an infinite number of locations in which to see small off-circuit exhibitions.
Vittorio Sella, “Her Majesty Queen Margherita and her entourage on the Lysjoch, Dufourspitze, Gnifetti peak”, 1893, cataloguing AL 1590 Fondazione Sella, © Vittorio Sella, courtesy Festival della Fotografia Etica, Lodi
Above all, from the three exhibitions of the first edition in 2010, reaching almost twenty-five in 2024, also incorporating, for the fourth consecutive year, the WRA – Documenting Humanity award (World Report Award, divided into 7 sections) and becoming the Italian headquarters of the World Press Photo, presumably the most prestigious international photojournalism competition in the world. We are faced with a look that is visual but also and profoundly anthropological on wars, environmental catastrophes, individual and collective social dramas, and the increasingly frequent migrations resulting from this list. After all, the words of the Calabrian anthropologist Vito Teti stand out and hover over many exhibitions: «Leaving and staying are the two poles of the history of humanity. The right to migrate corresponds to the right to stay, building another sense of places and of oneself». Between the many photographs exhibited, perhaps the only common element found, barring exceptions, is that of the total and justified absence of aesthetic elements. Director Alberto Prina is right when he says that the stories of the Festival are exciting, in the most dramatic and disturbing sense that must be given to this adjective. Both the reports and the individual shots that the visitor has the opportunity to see are, in fact, dramatic fragments of a narrative that sees at the center of everything the abomination of man on man and of man on nature.
Giles Clarke, from the “Haiti in turmoil” series, 2021-2024, © Giles Clarke, courtesy Festival della Fotografia Etica, Lodi
Having cleared the necessary introductory and contextual premise, the writer prefers to focus his attention on what, in his own and very subjective opinion, he considers of greatest interest, rather than going through a notional roundup of news from all the Festival venues. Following this personal thread, one cannot fail to report the reportage that won the WRA master: Haiti in Turmoil by Giles Clarke, an intense journey into the heart of the civil violence that torments the small Caribbean country. The shots on display take us by the hand into the suffering, fear, human and social devastation and also into inexplicable but luminous areas of respite. Clarke’s reportage is general on the Haitian affair; there is also a monographic focus on the main actor in this dramatic chaos, Jimmy Chérizier (known as Barbecue), a former assault policeman and now leader of one of the groups, the G9 Family, among the most ferocious in the Haitian chessboard.
Ingmar Björn Nolting, “Untitled”, from the “An anthology of a changing climate” series, 2023, © Ingmar Björn Nolting, courtesy Festival della Fotografia Etica, Lodi
Also interesting is the story of how Germany is tackling the issue of the climate crisis. Ingmar Björn Nolting tells us about the ambitious German strategies against the crisis and how, recently, the push has weakened, so that the transition to renewable energy is receiving less and less impetus from the government laws and within more traditional public opinion. An Anthology of Changing Climate is a reportage that received a special mention at the WRA also because it shows a society that, like a Janus, on the one hand chains itself to trees in order to prevent them from being cut down, and on the other dramatically increases the number of private jet flights, notoriously high in pollution. Mozambique is the protagonist at the Festival in at least a couple of circumstances and always for a reason unknown to most: it is the perfect victim of the climate crisis. Although it contributes to an infinitesimal extent, the Portuguese-speaking country of Africa has long been plagued by cyclones, violent floods and desertification processes. That absent element of aesthetic art already mentioned here is partly present in the Africa Blues project by Edoardo Delille and Giulia Piermartiri. In this reportage, the narrative part of a territory continually plagued by climatic phenomena that were almost unknown until a few decades ago is striking, as is the overlapping game of an inhabited house that, through a live projection, becomes a disturbing scenario of devastation.
Patryk Jaracz, “Kids learning how to ride a bicycle in the fields of Ukraine” Rivne Region. Single Shot Award of the World Report Award 2024, © Patryk Jaracz, courtesy Festival della Fotografia Etica, Lodi
Polish photographer Kasia Strek was awarded in the Spotlight Award section of the WRA – Documenting Humanity for her reportage, extended to many countries of the world, on the difficulties, suffering and in some cases the impossibility encountered by those who decide to have an abortion. The photographic project The Price of Choice is also a lateral examination of the tightening of the laws on the right to choose which, according to what has been exposed, affects at least one woman out of three across the globe. Among the single shots, the mare magnum expands its boundaries. The photograph that officially stands out on the cover of the Festival catalogue shows a group of little girls in a farm field struggling with a bicycle, while in the background and above the roofs of a village, a smoke column swirls following an explosion. We are in Ukraine and the shot Kids Learning How to Ride a Bicycle by Patryk Jaracz won the Single Shot Award, even though it is obviously an integral part of a larger photographic project.
Lalo de Almeida, “Untitled”, photo taken for the newspaper “Folha de São Paulo”, from the “Amazonian Dystopia” series, 2011- 2021, © Lalo de Almeida, courtesy Festival della Fotografia Etica, Lodi
Silvia Alessi‘s Afghan Hairdresser has some Dadaist elements on her face. In reality, the cardboard covering parts of the woman’s face is necessary to avoid identifying her, given the constant restriction of rights that the Taliban regime is implementing in that unfortunate Asian country. Equally impressive from a more strictly artistic point of view is the shot by Palestinian photographer Mohammed Salem who immortalizes a contemporary Pietà in Gaza: a woman dressed in a long blue tunic and her face covered holds her nephew’s body sealed in a white sheet in a Michelangelo-esque Pietà position. The shot, entitled A Palestinian Woman Holds Her Granddaughter’s Body, recalls the great Western artistic tradition of sculptural Pietàs, but clashes with the executioners’ lack of human pity. Finally, always among the individual shots to be told (this too, like all, a single stage of a larger reportage), it is particularly moving, precisely in the dramatic sense that we must attribute to this adjective, the disconsolate walk of a fisherman between one bank and the other of a branch of the Amazon River completely dried up by drought. It is impressive to see it and think how a people accustomed to crossing the river on a fast pirogue, can now move from one bank to the other on foot. The shot is entitled Drought in Amazonia and is by Brazilian photographer Lalo de Almeida, a profound connoisseur of some indigenous Amazonian tribes.
Info:
Ethical Photography Festival 2024
Openings on weekends from 28/09 to 27/10/2024 from 9:30 to 20:00
10 locations in Lodi and one in Montanaso Lombardo
www.festivaldellafotografiaetica.it
I am Giovanni Crotti and I was born in June 1968 in Reggio Calabria to be reborn in June 2014 in Piacenza, the city where I live. My income is guaranteed by digital consultancy, and I then spend it largely on art and letterature: I have been and am a content curator and organizer of cultural events for artists, galleries and institutional spaces, as well as a writer of exhibition reviews, creatives of every era and books.
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