L’Étiquette Bleue

Just as Domenico Quirici had observed the Bidogno of his time during his regular stays in his native land through its rituals, landscapes, and faces, Chattaway observes “his” Bidogno, village in which he has recently settled, offering us a sequence of images that places the observer in a constant interplay of questions and references around the very idea of memory transmission and the intimate human need to leave a tangible trace behind.Distributed throughout Bidogno, the exhibition is the opportunity to discover the current reality rooted throughout the territory.
At the center of Chattaway’s work for several years now is a reflection that invites the viewer to go beyond the mere current event suggested by a single image: his shots allude to the existence of another temporal dimension, whose passage appears infinitely more dilated than ours, whose “reading” demands equal slowness.

The omnipresence of photographic images as a tool for narrating our lives forces Chattaway to question the very role of the contemporary photographer: what is the purpose of producing new images if not to attempt to bring order within an overflowing and continuously expanding flow? And further: if the negative is the tangible proof of a moment as it occurred in the past, what value should be given to an image generated by artificial intelligence which – albeit suggestive and credible in its realism – is not linked to any particular event?