Trieste Photo Days 2020

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Trieste Photo Days 2020

November 22nd, 2020 by Walter Borghisani

URBAN Photo Awards 2020 edition ceremony

Italy is a country that has a unique artistic tradition and a photographic tradition perhaps not at the same level as some European countries but, nevertheless, interesting and rapidly growing in terms of quality and public.

Trieste is an Italian city that has a unique architecture and history involving Latin, Greek, Germanic, Jewish and Slavic cultures. It is the meeting place between Central Europe and the Mediterranean and is, therefore, a perfect place for a photography festival that represents the meeting point between the photographic cultures of the Mediterranean and those, sometimes more deeply rooted, of Central Europe. Trieste is an intellectually very active city and dotART is a Trieste cultural association that since 2009 has been promoting projects aimed at providing support and visibility to professional and amateur photographers, both locally and abroad. It is precisely from an idea of dotart that an international festival dedicated to urban photography was born which, since 2014, has explored contemporaneity through all forms of photography set in the urban fabric: Trieste Photo Days.

The aim of the festival is to promote a type of photography that bears artistic, documentary, ethnographic and sociological value, which offers evidence of today a cross-section of urban contemporaneity capable of talking about the social changes that take place in the big city as well as in the small village.

URBAN Photo Awards 2020 exhibition

A collaboration with dotArt was born from a call from F-Stop Magazine, which has always distinguished itself from other magazines for the desire to confront and promote collective works: the issue #102 STAYING HOME TOGETHER. The purpose of the call was to explore the current global experience shared by photographers who portray their own experience. Feelings such as joy, boredom, hope, anxiety turned out to be universal and shareable as well as the photographic language and its narrative capacity and its historical value. The result has been a wide range of artistic responses to the pandemic, ranging from isolation (even if in the family) to the need for connection, grouped by approaches that have allowed us to determine real macro-categories of artistic response to the pandemic.

Staying Home Together is also a limited-edition publication with more than 5000 photos and 248 pages for a unique historical value and a multidisciplinary selection operation never performed by dotART and F-stop magazine on a global scale.

STAYING HOME TOGETHER book presentation (Walter Borghisani)

The photographic project was exhibited on October 17 at Palazzo Meizlik in Aquileia (UD). The presentation of the book, which had an Italian premiere on October 25 at the Sala Xenia in Trieste, was an opportunity for discussion between me and the artistic director of the festival, Angelo Cucchetto, which included talking about how photography has changed following the pandemic. The event has sold out (obviously respectful of anti-covid prescriptions).

URBAN Photo Awards 2020 edition ceremony with Alex and Rebecca Webb

It was a pleasure to meet with Stefano Ambroset and Mara Zanette, organizers of the festival, and with WPF winner Alain Schroeder as well as to listen to Alex and Rebecca Webb (presidents of the 2020 edition). It was nice to participate in the enthusiasm of those who believe in the dissemination of culture, especially photography, and to have represented F-Stop Magazine in this internationally important and continuously improving event.

Trieste Photo Days is the festival you would not expect in a city with a truly unique air.

To buy the book: https://www.exhibitaround.com/en/saht-prenotazione/