CAMERA Italian Centre for Photography is a cultural foundation located in Turin and completely dedicated to photography. Positioned in the city center, very close tothe Mole Antonelliana, the Po River and the Museo Egizio, it is firstly an exhibition space of almost 2000m2 for Italian and international photography and visual culture. The 2021 exhibition programme has been organised according to two main fields of research: established artists and historical shows have been hosted in the main spaces, while mid-career and young talents ideas and exhibitions in our project room.

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At the same time, CAMERA operates in the educational field with workshops, summer schools, talks and activities addressed to different audiences interested in photography. Another important field of research is related to private and public photography archives, who are in the middle of our attention through conservation and valorisation practices. Started from the autumn of 2015, CAMERA is a platform for display, production, archiving, training, meeting, and debate all around photography.

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Related to the criteria for the selection of our 2021 artists included in the Futures programme, we decided to adopt an inclusive approach to mainly represent the greatest number of possibilities and variations of photography practice today. The starting point in this situation has been practical: what does photography mean today in the Italian context? How can we disseminate new trends, aesthetics, and topics to Italian cultural scenario?

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From the linguistic point of view, our selection ranges from an approach deeply grounded in investigating social and cultural issues through a register of reporting matrix to another more characterised by a performative influence. In this way, we underline how they often mix different typologies of sources: not only digital and analogical own made materials, but also scientifical, manipulated, archival, downloaded images and so on are used to build new narratives about the contemporary.At the same time, with their project, our talents can question the role of photography today and the perception (and modification) of society through it. Mixing bidimensional images with videos, installations, projections, books, and written texts they offer a complex and multifaceted world in which different interpretations take shape.

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From the thematic point of view, our talents investigate a kind of aesthetic of trauma and catastrophes focusing their attention and sensibility on issues related to the main challenges in contemporary times: ecology and disasters, social and personal interactions, inequalities and decolonisation, our relationship with history and fictional aspects. More than a self-referential and formal dissertation about technique and forms in photographic field, their projects and research seem to be part of a kind of huge collective discourse about self-determination and emancipation in which they take active part lighting up some corner with their point of view.

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Text by Giangavino Pazzola- Curator