Landscape nominee

Alien in my hometown and unable to fully reconcile myself with its system of beliefs, I use infrared photography and infra-red video surveillance illuminators to render a ordinary, everyday landscape of my childhood in Italy in an extraordinary palette, reminiscent of the Australian Impressionism. I do so in the attempt to tackle the mundane things, to establish a new dialogue with the place I come from, and to sublimate the alienation into wonder.

I believe that beauty is the sharpest tool in the box. Here, I used beauty to win the attention of the viewers that may have experienced the same alienation in their own hometowns. I come from a place to which I have never belonged. There, the magnificence of the landscape combines with an immeasurable remoteness from the contemporary – both geographical and cultural. Shaped by the history and values of the generations that came before us, our geography of origin is, in fact, our first and foremost cognitive dissonance. And, to me, this is unbearable.

– “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.