Let the Right One In [electronic resource].

Link Editions 2013

Open access content

Damiano Nava likes to use the camera as a diary. After moving to Berlin, in November 2009, he found it hard to spontaneously meet people of his generation who might be interested in being photographed. He didn’t speak German, and it was hard for him to establish the kind of intimate relationship required for the project. “I was like someone having problems finding a soulmate, so it seemed like a natural step to turn to the internet,” he writes in his introduction. He wrote an ad and posted it on Craigslist and Exberliner. For about two years, the ad generated new contacts. Nava received about a thousand e-mails, met around a hundred people and took pictures of the few who were comfortable with him. This book gathers these photos, together with a selection of the emails he received, and an “Afterword” by Italian art critic and curator Guido Bartorelli. According to Bartorelli, “Nava’s work has roots both in art history and in today’s all-pervasive photography craze,” and is original in “his ability to represent, to encapsulate this form of collective—or generational—creativity” without giving up with a traditional, much debated task of photography: that of providing “a trace or impression of reality”, here completed by the emails, themselves used as “traces, fetish objects.” The result is a faithful portrait of a generation, with its narcissism and its peculiar relationship with traveling, communication, body language and image making.
https://www.librarystack.org/let-the-right-one-in/?ref=unknown

Documentary photography
Photography, Artistic

Text

Damiano Nava
Guido Bartorelli