Day by Day: the great deserts of the planet in John R. Pepper’s iconic photographs in Todi
The great exhibition that will be hosted in the scenario of the historic center of Todi, from 3 October to 28 November 2020, is born with the collaboration of the United States Embassy in Italy: the photographs by John R. Pepper, entitled "Inhabited Deserts ” , Will be set up in the spaces of the Civic Museum and Pinacoteca and in the Complex of the “ Eagle's Nest ” . Created by the Municipality of Todi with the fundamental contribution of the Culture and Art Foundation, an offshoot of the Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale Foundation chaired by Emmanuele Francesco Maria Emanuele, the exhibition will present 53 analogue images of John R. Pepper's Leica M6 , without artifice, in white and black of the great reporters. These are the visions of a well-rounded photographer and artist, to tell his journey through the most remote deserts of the planet. “Deserts have always fascinated photographers,” says Pepper, “and the reason that often brings them there is to capture the beauty of the landscape. A good challenge, but it was not what I was looking for: I wanted to go further. My idea, my intent, was to use the desert as the painter exploits the virginity of a white canvas. I tried to discover which images were offered to my gaze: at times they were figurative visions, other times abstract and the symbiosis between the landscape in front of me and the images buried inside me. At the end of this subliminal research, my photography, my 'canvas', becomes the expression of my profound being, of my perceptions as an artist ”.
Three years of work, 18,000 kilometers traveled in the deserts of Dubai, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Mauritania, Oman, Russia and the United States, have allowed Pepper to discover suggestive places that express emotional as well as geographical complexity and diversity. Above all, an interior journey that emerges from the silences of the images and reveals the discovery of how much these unite humanity in intense and profound encounters. For the curator of the exhibition Gianluca Marziani, “Pepper escapes the wits of digital software , avoiding the firework make-up and marrying the analogical theme in a sensitive way. It modulates the gray scales with dowsing sharpness, outlining the dunes as if they were blades, dissecting the contrasts with semantic ambivalences, sensing the instant in which the sun draws without smudging ”. Observes the co-curator, the Russian art critic Kirill Petrin: “Following John Pepper on this adventure allows you to discover a couple of things about yourself. Even some of his legendary desert guides, men who have spent their entire lives in those places and know them from top to bottom, admit they have never seen their deserts in this light. These photographs, paradoxically, do not refer to the actual places where they were taken. They lead elsewhere, to a new place where the mind and the imagination can live ”. The mayor of Todi, Antonino Ruggiano declares his pride “to host the personal exhibition of John R. Pepper in our city. His photographs, in addition to surprising and seducing the viewer, offer the possibility of being transported to mystical places: the deserts of the world, all apparently the same and inhospitable, but which actually reveal millennia of history and life of different peoples ". Finally Emanuele comments: “My sincere appreciation for John R. Pepper's talent dates back to 2016, the year in which the Terzo Pilastro Foundation, on my impulse, hosted his personal Evaporations in the rooms of the Palazzo Cipolla Museum. With this new ambitious project, which involved three years of work and the crossing of a large part of the globe, Pepper manages to give us an image of our planet that evokes the miracle of Creation, a return to 'Year Zero' from which everything started, in which the only apparent emptiness that transpires from each image is filled with tangible contents: one above all, the need to stop and listen to one's conscience, to finally re-establish a newfound harmony between Man and Nature ".
The exhibition itinerary is accompanied by videos on the photographer's backstage, with interviews with the guides who accompanied him and the characters he met; a “behind the scenes” through which the visitor can understand Pepper's complex photographic creative process, from preparations, to shooting and printing, thus sharing the artist's full experience as if it were his own.
John R. Pepper (1958), lives between Palermo, Paris and New York. His career in the world of analogue black and white photography began at the age of 14 with an internship alongside Ugo Mulas. In the same year he published his first photograph in Newsweek magazine. John is the son of the American journalist and writer Curtis Bill Pepper and Beverly Pepper, an artist famous for his monumental works. Sister Jorie Graham is an internationally renowned poetess, Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 1996. John R. Pepper works with the Leica M6 and Ilford HP5 film, printing on baryta paper with silver salts. John R. Pepper's photographs are present in private collections and museums around the world. The “Inhabited Deserts” exhibition arrives in Todi after having made its debut in Paris and completed an exhibition cycle that has already touched Tehran, Tel Aviv, Dubai and St. Petersburg. In 2021 the exhibition will arrive in several cities in Europe and the United States.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/rubriche/day-by-day-i-grandi-deserti-del-pianeta-nelle-iconiche-fotografie-di-john-r-pepper-a-todi/ on Sat, 26 Sep 2020 03:31:00 +0000.