This year the Festival presents a new format centered around the Palazzo delle Esposizioni which hosts the official exhibitions and events.

The Festival also welcomes the exhibition “Through the Window” by Giorgio Barrera, winner in 2008 of the second edition of the International FotoGrafia-Baume & Mercier Award.

 

The partnership between Zoneattive and Baume & Mercier has resulted in the International FotoGrafia-Baume & Mercier Award, open with no restrictions to all professional photographers.Photography has established itself as an art accessible to everyone, unbelievably contemporary and constantly evolving. Consequently, Baume & Mercier has chosen to appear as a company that keeps pace with the times and is perpetually eager to capture past, present and future memories.

 

 

 

There has been a large number of participants in this third edition of the International FotoGrafia – Baume & Mercier Award, in spite of the fact that the announcement included a series of prerequisites such as the originality of the project presented, the rigorous nature of the artistic research, expressive quality, an innovative form and content as well as its feasibility and compliance with the requirements spelled out on the participation forms. Many projects were presented, stemming from both Europe and the rest of the world, all of the highest quality. This represents an important testimony to the vitality of photography throughout the world and a resounding success for FotoGrafia itself and for Baume & Mercier, a company that has chosen to associate its image of a modern watch brand with a project that highlights and honors innovation and creativity.

 

The winner of the third edition of the International FotoGrafia – Baume & Mercier Award was announced in Rome at the opening of the FotoGrafia International Festival 2009: Giuliano Matteucci, with his project “Ecclesia”.

 

Born in Rome in 1976, Matteucci has worked as a photographer with many foundations and aid organizations including AMREF, the St Egidio Community, the Vodafone Foundation, as well as with official bodies such as the municipal authorities of Rome, the Latium and Sardinian Regions. His photographs have appeared in some of the best-known Italian and international daily newspapers and magazines.

 

Inspired by the theme for this award, "Joy: visions and portrayals” in harmony with this Festival, Matteucci presented a project entitled “Ecclesia, West Africa”, a project addressing the church in rural Africa. The word Ecclesia can mean the church as a place of worship or all the believers, hence rural African churches are not only a place of worship for villages, but are instead primarily the centre of society, place where people speak, where decisions are made, where meetings take place. In this context, Matteucci’s photographic research questions the balance and the many ambivalent aspects of these social identities. Rural churches have interacted and over the centuries become linked to the various African traditions, to the extent that they are an original synthesis that has resulted in new cultural specificities.

 

Giuliano Matteucci has investigated Africa for many years and has never taken shortcuts. He investigates’ Africa’s "normality", the authenticity of one of the many existing Africas. Everything is balanced in Matteucci’s work: the meaning of time, the choice of colors and the use of a wide-angle lens to portray these rural churches and the believers who attend them. From the expressive perspective he chooses the wide-angle format to broaden and emphasize the context, for landscapes and for portraits, but also because he wishes to adapt to rural reality in which buildings and horizons are generally low and leveled out. Giuliano Matteucci comes into contact with these places and these people in a direct manner. Using his creativity he becomes one of them, he joins them, he participates, but at the same time he is welcomed, because they understand both his great involvement and his equally great discretion. This is all evident in his photographs, and in his portraits and landscapes one sees the single corpus of a profound work of art.

 

Such are the motivations expressed by the jury – FotoGrafia’s artistic director Marco Delogu, the director of Contrasto Roberto Koch and curator Jean-Luc Soret - in awarding the prize to the Italian photographer’s project which will be exhibited at the 2010 edition of FotoGrafia.