Olivo Barbieri: Viaggi in Italia

With fifty-two images created from 1982 to 2009, "Viaggi in Italia" stands as an essay on Olivo Barbieri's entire oeuvre, revealing the multifaceted contours of an unusual Italy. I once asked Luigi Ghirri what he was looking for and he immediately replied, the truth. I, on the other hand, have sought to represent the invisible; could truth and the invisible be the same thing? This question posed by Olivo Barbieri contains the entire sense of Reversing (of viewpoint, of the ordinary way of seeing and dealing with the real) and Revealing (of different stances one may take before the world) that translate truth into virtuality. Or into impossibility. This is a photography of places, of architectures, of urban and natural landscapes, of individuals and populations. Within it we see the modus vivendi, styles and tendencies, affiliations and de-localizations. This is not photography as reportage, but rather the type of creative voyage that conjoins visual beauty with a unique poetics, capable of following a connecting expressive thread through each image, whichever corner of the Earth it is from.