Night Photography nominee

A lonely midsummer night. It is not clear to me the where, or whether this was a dream or real, as there was no witness to it.

The prairie, and its inhabitants, are the allegory of my, and our, aloneness. In a society which is growing increasingly interconnected and interdependent, we are in fact living the paradox of solitude. Confined behind a screen, alienated in the crowd of big cities, or taken thousands miles away from the affection of the loved ones by frequent trips, we live more and more often a solitary existence. A new chapter in the evolution of social animals — I suppose.

In the present work, it is not only the isolated life of a harras of horses being documented. Rather, it is documented the emotional dimension of those that, having suffered loss of the beloved, loneliness, and grief, have equipped themselves with higher inner resources, eventually learning to live their solitary condition.

The body of work was shot in new moon nights. The scenes were lit by illuminators designed for doing video surveillance which emit only infra-red light, invisible to all mammals - photographers included. All images were made using infrared cameras.

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.