Olivo Barbieri

 
“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.
This monograph has been published for the exhibition Olivo Barbieri. Viaggi in Italia 1982-2009, Palazzo Foscolo, Oderzo (Treviso), 3-5 July 2010
Olivo Barbieri is an Italian artist and photographer of urban environments. He is recognized for his innovative technique creating miniature still photography from actual landscapes by simulating shallow depth of field Barbieri has exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995, 1997), among other international exhibitions, and in galleries and museums throughout Europe, North America, and China.
 
Sabrina Zannier is a curator.