How to Read a Photograph is a photograph written by hand. By opening the digital file of an image and viewing its contents as text, I found myself faced first with metadata and then with ASCII code. Writing this text onto the wall of my studio with a black pastel pencil, like during a school examination at the blackboard, became both a possible answer to the question posed by the title and an attempt to enter the photograph through its mysterious language, using the physical gesture of writing on the wall.
Whether a photograph can still be defined as a photograph or becomes a point of contact between different forms of writing remains an open question.
The complete textual encoding of the image is extremely long, and the original idea was to transcribe it progressively through a series of installations, each presenting a consecutive section of the file until the entire photograph had eventually been rewritten by hand.
The work was first realized on an entire wall of the studio. A fragment of this ongoing transcription was later adapted to the 150 × 150 cm format of the Premio Fabbri per la Fotografia 2018, where it was selected by the jury and exhibited as part of the competition.
24.11.2018 @Villa Brandolini, Pieve di Soligo, Premio Fabbri 2018