Night Photography nominee

Can a place in which we grew up be alien to us?

Landscapes out of time. A home to which we have never belonged. The great beauty and the immeasurable remoteness. Shaped by the history and values of the generations that came before us, our places of origin are often our first and foremost cognitive dissonance. And that’s unbearable.

Unable to fully reconcile myself with the system of beliefs permeating my hometown, in the present project I use infrared photography to render ordinary, everyday landscapes of my childhood in an extraordinary palette, reminiscent of the Arthur Streeton’s ‘Golden summer, Eaglemont’ and the Australian Impressionism. I do so in the attempt to tackle the mundane things and to sublimate the alienation into amazement. As such, this documentary work is Beat!
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"Yellow is a light which has been dampened by darkness; Blue is a darkness weakened by light." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Alfonso De Gregorio is an Italian process-oriented conceptual documentary photographer based in Dubai and two-times winner of the Allard Prize Photography competition. At the intersection of art and documentary, his idea of photography is to raise powerful and political questions about the world we live in. He believes that photography succeeds in doing so when it spotlights social, cultural, and environmental realities, and provides us with new perspectives and lenses for interpreting where we stand.

Alfonso uses his cybersecurity background to research novel processes. Assessed their narrative power, he matches them to a topic and develops the concept. The final projects are the result of the combination of the designed photographic process and the concept, backed by his craft.

In his latest projects, Alfonso repurposed imaging technology for doing video surveillance to the spaces that lays at the intersection of art and documentary. He turned surveillance technology towards himself, to record the resulting introspective investigations. In so doing, he aimed to address wider realities that the viewers may have experienced in their lives too.