It is difficult to approach photography today, when all reality has passed under the hegemonic category of seeing, which appears to be the only possibility of interpreting the world. Today photography - and its developments - have taken on the role that painting had for centuries, becoming the only expressive language of history and its protagonists, transformed into celebrities offered to visibility without escape.

However, there are still microspaces of resistance, or if we want openings of meaning, in which photography detaches itself from this apparently inevitable destiny and takes another path. Returning to focus on those genres which in the traditional classification of painting were the least noble: landscape, daily life, still life. When this shift occurs, photography is defined as "author's" and demonstrates all its expressive and poetic potential. Appearing as the result of choices that are not in front of the lens but behind it. Choices therefore which, as in Giorgio Morandi's painting, are all the more significant the less significant the portrayed subject is.

“The Subject Matter”, the exhibition open until April 4th at the Galleria Viasaterna in Milan is the demonstration of this experience. Curated by Luca Fiore, it is a journey through themes far from spectacularity where photography becomes the means to underline what often goes unnoticed, starting from the title. “The English language,” explains Fiore, “uses the expression ‘the subject matter’ to indicate what is in front of the photographic lens. However, if we use this expression in the plural, ‘the subject matters’, it can also be translated as ‘the subject matters’. If we then consider the ambiguity of the word ‘subject/subject’, there is also a third way of understanding this expression, in which the word ‘subject’ indicates the person who performs an action. The author’s choice to focus on what was not previously considered important has, as a consequence, the ennoblement of what one would be led to ignore or despise”.

The exhibition thus puts this intuition to the test by combining groups of works by five artists of very different nationalities and histories. Terri Weifenbach (United States, 1957), Vanessa Winship (United Kingdom, 1960), Takashi Homma (Japan, 1962), Gerry Johansson (Sweden, 1945) and Guido Guidi (Italy, 1941).

The first presents unpublished color shots taken between 2019 and 2021 in the public gardens of Paris, photos in which the visible seems to dissolve in plays of light and color in which nature becomes an indistinct dream where only the appearance of a bird brings us back to fragile reality. Winship, on the other hand, the first female photographer to win the Henri Cartier Bresson award (2011), takes us to the American Midwest with images taken from her book Snow. Bare trees, isolated huts, frozen lakes. Cold and silent images where there is no "story", no "heroism", no "character" but only a diaphanous, frozen yet very intense narration.

Continuing, the waves of Homma arrive, the Japanese photographer now famous for returning every year to the same beach in Hawaii to look at the sea. Here too, no romance or fatal moments but only shots of insignificant or perhaps "not particularly decisive" moments. Going downstairs you encounter Johansson's work in a Spain that is impossible to recognize without captions. Black and white shots of marginal aspects, which say nothing except as a whole, revealing unexpected geometries and arcane balances. The journey, in some way, could only end with an unprecedented tribute to Guido Guidi, one of the masters of this photographic approach. A series shot in Chiesuola, in the province of Latina, where the true, only protagonist is a ray of light that moves across the floor at different times of the day, transforming into a metaphor for our relationship with the world and the passage of time.

In the end the impression is that The Subject Matters is not so much an exhibition as a lesson, or rather an invitation, to look. Indeed, to stop and look at those aspects that escape us because we don't think they matter. Among these is the gallery itself, a true synthesis of architecture and design signed by Flavio Albanese and commissioned, in 2015, by Irene Crocco who represents its soul and driving force. 

By the way, Viasaterna is the homage to the imaginary street that Dino Buzzati describes in the panels of “Poema a Fumetti” (1969). A book that celebrates a world where dreams and reality merge, intertwining people, destinies, lives thanks to the imagination. Just like this Via Saterna, which more than an art gallery is like one of the doors of Hugo Pratt's Venice, which the Venetians open when they are tired of everything because they know that if you go through it it takes you elsewhere.

Opening image: Takashi Homma, New Waves, 2017 © Takashi Homma, courtesy Viasaterna