Naked:#he
Year: 2021 – ongoing
Device: REFLEX CANON A1
Concept and photography: Gaia Adducchio
The project here proposed is based on analog photos. All the prints are gelatin silver prints on baryta paper, realized by the author herself.
“You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see,
and you will be that, the unknown part of me,
until I die.”
Marguerite Duras – Emily L – 1987
The photographic project “Naked:#he”, a body of work of about 50 analog images shot on 35 mm films, is the natural extension from the previous project “Naked:#she”, realized in 2016 and with female bodies as subjects. It’s the further step in a journey of photographic research exploring the dichotomy between life and death through an aesthetic reminding of individual dissolution combined to the use of the body as an agent of life.
I worked with the male nudity using the same elements of the female one, telling the coexistence of creative and destructive forces through eroticism, sensuality, power, transforming through my images these same bodies in “supernatural” archetypes capable of moving among different realms thanks to their exorcistic qualities.
An integral part of this process was to re-discover and acknowledge the relation both men and society have to the male body, the different meaning and consequent function that it’s given to it compared to the female one. A deeply rooted education to self-determination that transforms in a political act of objectification the simple gesture by a female photographer (without an intimate relationship with the subject to allow such access) to portrait a male body.
Maybe also because of that, while going through my pictures, I asked myself if I transmitted the same communicative acquittance that was so easy for me to find with my female subjects, or if, on the other hands, this feeling of someone being the “unknown part of me”, so different in his relation to himself and others, stayed harnessed within the folds of my images.
Gaia Adducchio
Festival & Exhibitions
July 2024 – it’s part of the collective exhibition “Erotica” by the curatorship of Ivana Galli, Patrizio Cipollini and Simona Innocenti in Forte Marghera, Mestre (Venice), Italy
https://fondazionefortemarghera.it/eventi/erotica-la-fotografia-erotica-nel-xx-secolo/
November 2023 – it’s part of the “Festa dell’Arte a Monteverde” curated by Federico Raponi, Rome, Italy
https://www.romatoday.it/eventi/festa-dell-arte-a-monteverde-teatro-villa-pamphilj-12-novembre-2023.html
February 2023 – is shown at the Grand Palais Ephémère, Ecole Militaire -Tour Eiffel in Paris during the Salon Comparaisons exhibition, France
https://comparaisons.org/
August/September 2022 – among the projects shown at the solo exhibition “Ritratti – Portraits” during “Segni: Festival della fotografia” in Capo di Ponte, Valcamonica curated by Graziano Filippini and Veronica Marioli
http://www.segnifestivalfotografia.it/
January 2022 – solo exhibition “Femminile Singolare: Ritratti di famiglia e altre storie” by Virgilio Patarini is shown at the Museo di Nadro in Ceto, Valcamonica, Italy
www.zamenhofart.it
November 2021 – among the projects shown at the solo exhibition during Prague Photo 2021 curated by Luisa Briganti and Gabriele Agostini, artistic director Iva Nesvadbova, Prague, Czech Republic
https://www.praguefoto.cz/
