Tilde Giani Gallino | IL LATO PSICOLOGICO DELLA FOTOGRAFIA
From 24/11/2011 To 15/01/2012
Raffaella De Chirico is pleased to announce the photographic solo exhibition by Tilde Giani Gallino, who is Professor of Psychology at the University of Turin and a member of the World Photography Collection - London.
The title of the exhibition “The psychological side of photography” refers to a sentence of Nadar (1857) and is a homage to the famous photographer, probably the first one to associate the concepts of psychology and photography. These two different forms of knowledge are two of the main passions of Tilde Giani Gallino: she thinks they are very similar, even if one is closer to science and the other to art. The difference lies in the way of developing the research and in the models used to deepen the complexity of external environment.
The exhibition includes a selection of thirty recent works. The catalogue will show five different photographical dossiers, each of them introduced by a text of the artist. The first dossier focuses on Turin, the city where Tilde Giani Gallino was born and studied. Its title is “Turin Metaphysics and museum cars” and it refers to two peculiarities of the city. Only in this case Tilde Giani Gallino used digital processing in order to put together some of the cars showed at the museum and some of her favorite paintings. The second dossier is called “Reflective shop windows and magical realism”: in these works the artist used the camera to represent reality in its wholeness including those small details human eye can not usually see. The objective allowed the artist to represent a surreal sphere: in a shop window many different subjects are reflected at the same time – dummies and walkers together with the city- as if we were wondering in a fabulous world following Alice’s steps and Lewis Carroll’s voice.
The third dossier is focused on the theme of “Snapshots. Spatio-temporal-emotive photos” and it tells how fast everything happens: a photographer sees something and he/she immediately takes a picture. After the click the photographer checks the display to see if he was able to get that particular subject or if it got lost forever. In the fourth dossier “Psychophoto in black and white” Giani Gallino deals with a classical controversy in the world of photography: the opposition between black and white. Her choice of not using color underlines volumes and shapes opposition together with the contrast between light and darkness.
At each end of a curved or straight black configuration there is an impassable threshold, a border formed by the interposing of white and this, in turn, finds its own black threshold. A contrast or a dialogue between the two? Could the fascination with B/W be due to an intervention of the psyche that perhaps we do not even perceive?
The fifth dossier is named “Long shadows in Rue Joubert” and it focuses on the world of shadow. The title is a little bit enigmatic, as shadows generally are. Actually the Shadow is an element belonging both to our culture and psychology: even Freud and Jung dealt with it.
All the pictures are the result of a personal and long research. Photography needs to be supported by thought: we could define every single shot as a “visual thought” or a “photographical thought”. Photography in fact seems to be the “royal way” to communicate with other people.
On December 13th and January 12th the artist will hold two conferences focused on several themes connected with Photography and Psychology. Both the conferences will take place at Raffaella De Chirico Art Gallery at 7 PM.