The female body is not necessarily a stereotype of grace and lightness, it can be wild, with a musculature that distances ideas of fragility. Samuele Nucci‘s photographs describe a contrasting feeling, which associates a statuesque vision of the body, as such constant and almost imperishable, with a fluidity destined to make the role of the body in space change continuously.
Francesca splits the block of real air in which she is inserted, stretching the nerves and swelling the muscles in a choreography never sketched, which helps to take possession of the space. Samuele Nucci’s shots are a bursting intrusion that doesn’t need titles, categories and patinas. The scratches of the film are like tattoos on the body, enhancing the roughness of a unique physicality, a canon of primordial beauty that lives moments of discreet and almost rejected elegance.

1854 Media and the British Journal of Photography have announced the best portrait photographs of 2021. The 100 photographs in the competition trace the history of the United Kingdom over the past two years, bringing the camera closer to the eyes of so many of the key players in the fight against the virus and chronicling the social fabric of Britain in all its minorities.
The photos are symbolic of the pandemic and the lockdown, so among the portraits we see images of doctors, or children playing in the street surrounded by brick houses, a scene far removed from what we could see only a year ago. In a nation that is widely multicultural and diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender, Paralympic athletes, a little girl with her skateboard and even the face of Vivienne Westwood, a symbol of British fashion as well as an activist on the front line for years, appear among the photos of Portrait of Britain 2021.

England’s largest annual photography exhibition is also an event to showcase experiments in photographic technique, ranging from traditional portraiture to newer techniques.
“In a world fraught with division, portraiture is, in many ways, the ultimate act of collaboration. Perhaps portraiture cannot solve Britain’s identity crisis, but it can help us rejoice in the diversity of our people” said 1854. Precisely because the Portrait of Britain Winners 2021 photographs are a collective narrative, the shots will appear on special screens in airports, streets and train stations. 
A volume of all 100 winning photographs is also scheduled to be published by Hoxton Mini Press.

London-based photographer Kate Steele realized the importance of phototherapy in finding peace with herself.The method is quite simple, you take the camera, you direct it with the lens towards the chosen subject and you take the picture, so that you can remember an image forever, or you can analyze it, understand it more deeply. Kate Steele once held the camera, tried to turn the lens not towards the outside but to herself, in order to self-analyze and understand more deeply.
The photos that follow are part of the project Her Name is Kat, the story of a friendship between Kat and Kate, with the former able to make the latter rediscover the power of her fragilities. The inner search starts by accepting her own naked body, a map where find the signs of her own life experiences and traumas, that have contaminated the happiness, in order to found it again.
Kate Steele’s photography is phototerapia, shoot in black and white with a grain that makes the artist’s vision of herself rough, a vision yet to be defined and smoothed, always looking at the lens and not through.

“Wisdom of Uncertainty is a work about awareness. About the fact that we do not exist if someone else does not perceive and describe us. We cannot exist except in relation to someone else. Each house is interdependent on the others,” says photographer Francesco Stelitano. The author of the exhibition at Villa Brivio in Nova Milanese, a few kilometres from Milan, deals with new social dynamics, uncertainty and entropy. Stelitano investigates a present poised between a state of alert for the ecosystem, the economic crisis and the loss of values in living communities.

To represent these concepts, the author takes drops of a liquid compound based on food colouring, carefully placed on a glass plate covered by a thin layer of water. “The entropy of the tiny coloured entities is activated on the wet glass. The resulting forms are bodies reproduced in moments of relationship, of expansion and in which a force of attraction is at work,” writes Laura Colantonio in the exhibition text. The exhibition set-up is designed by the architecture studio Parasite 2.0, which has created non-traditional photographic supports, contributing to the story of the complexity of the image. The set up proposes different ways of enjoying the images and keeping them moving, also reasoning on the theme of interdependence.

With his images, Stelitano invites us to look at reality with depth, and with the awareness that there are still numerous unknown unknowns to be identified and then resolved. The key word in his work is therefore “complexity”, which according to the author “does not indicate the fact that something cannot be understood, but means that the result of two elements is greater than its sum“.

Wisdom of Uncertainty can be visited until 29 January 2022.

Photographic project: Francesco Stelitano
Set design and installations: Parasite 2.0
Scientific contribution: Nathan Shammah
Scientific advice: Nathan Shammah and Flavio Moriniello
Text edited by: Laura Colantonio and Francesco Stelitano
Exhibition organized by: Fondazione Rossi in collaboration with the Free Academy of Painting “Vittorio Viviani”.
Patronage: Nova Milanese Municipality

Author: Salvatore Peluso