7 days ago
Albert Watson Depicts Rome His Own Way in New Photography Exhibit
MILAN — Over the past five decades renowned photographer Albert Watson has had no shortage of blissful moments.
From portraying Alfred Hitchcock and Steve Jobs to taking beauty shots of Kate Moss, depicting Las Vegas landscapes and lensing fashion campaigns for the likes of Chanel, Prada and Levi's, his photographic career has brought him to many a place.
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For his latest solo exhibition, the largest ever mounted in Italy, Watson trained his lens on an entirely different subject: Rome. He sought to decipher its complexity layered in history and global fascination.
'Roma Codex,' which opens Thursday at the Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, gathers 200 large-scale black-and-white and color images by the famed photographer shot across two years spent wandering through Rome guided, he said, only by his instinct.
'I had to just experience Rome. I didn't want to approach it with preconceived ideas or the pressure of capturing what people expect to see. The city is overflowing with history, but I was interested in what happens in the spaces between the monuments, the energy of its streets, the faces, the movement,' Watson told WWD.
'I'm Scottish, not Roman. That gave me a certain freedom. Like Robert Frank photographing America, I was discovering Rome on my own terms,' he said.
Aiming to provide a new perspective on the city, Watson subverted all hierarchies between different subjects.
All images — spread across the three main halls of the Roman exhibiting space — have the same scale and are not arranged in thematic order.
'Whether it's the Colosseum or a portrait of a young actor, they all occupy the same visual space. That balance was essential to me,' Watson said. 'I didn't want to organize the images thematically. I like chaos, a kind of controlled disorder. It mirrors how people consume images now. You go from a tsunami to a dog to a fashion photo in seconds on your feed,' he added.
To be sure, interspersed amid cinematic views of the Colosseum, Ara Pacis and Villa Medici, among other landmarks, are portraits of personalities and people that are shaping the city's culture and everyday life.
They include Alda Fendi; Giancarlo Giammetti; Oscar-winning movie director Paolo Sorrentino; Italian actors Valeria Golino Riccardo Scamarcio, Kasia Smutniak, and Pierfrancesco Favino, as well as ballet dancers Roberto Bolle and Eleonora Abbagnato, and architects Massimiliano Fuksas and Doriana Mandrelli.
Shots inside the Rome Opera House's ballet school and underground clubs also contribute to trace Watson's view of the city.
'I didn't want to deliver a predictable portrait of the city. Romans already know the monuments. I wanted to show something else, something they maybe hadn't seen in quite that way,' Watson said.
'I photographed where I felt there was a story. For me, it was important that the monuments and the people carried the same weight… Rome presents itself to you, layer by layer, if you take the time to look,' the photographer said.
The exhibition — curated by Clara Tosi Pamphili and promoted by the Assessorato alla Cultura di Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo with help from Studio F.P. — runs through Aug. 3.
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