MASTERCLASS 2012

First session of the Masterclass 2012 was held at the photography studio CESURA in Pianello Val Tidone, Italy. The class was a very nice melting pot of cultures. It was formed by students from all different parts of the world such as China, Iran, Russia, The Balkans, Switzerland and Italy. After six full days with Alex Majoli each photographer started to work on their own project.

The second session of the masterclass was held in Sicily.  At the end of six-days of intense work like brainstorming, experimentation and editing, seven dummies have blossomed. Below you can read about the works of the students:

MIRO KUZMANOVIC - IDEOLOGY I-III

Ideology is an ongoing photography work rooted on my personal history, connected memories and experience leaving my native land the former Yugoslavia during the civil war in the nineties.

By revisiting familiar, sometimes nostalgic places, the pictures of present experience and memory show my obsession to images of Ideology and images that lead to Ideological behavior. Vanishing boundaries between reality and imaginary questioning my own existence.

The starting point of this work is in 2013, twenty years after I took my first pictures on a bus immigrating to Austria…

MICHELE SIBILONI - fuck it

"Broken eggs, bruised legs, torn skirts, laughing lads, crested cranes, packs of dogs, a wide-eyed man with a gun. The stories told by these grimy vignettes are at once a cartoon strip and an archive of the ephemeral, an African symphony and a third-world catastrophe, a naughty grope and a guilty giggle."

David Cecil

OLGA BUSHKOVA - GOOGLE WIFE & UNNAMED PROJECT ABOUT KIDS

Olga moved from Russia to Switzerland because her husband got a job at Google in Zurich.

She takes pictures of herself every time she meets her new community: the wives of other Google employees. Alongside this project she started a highly personal photographic diary about her wish to have a child and trying to convince her husband to experience the joy of parenthood.

Olga is still working on her two dummies.

PAOLO CIREGIA - THE BOY, THE BEAST AND THE BUTTERFLY

A dreamlike dimension suspended between the reality of the present indefinite future and far memories. The loneliness is an abyss that swallows us, but from which one emerges again refreshed, more aware, a little more alive and closer to the truth and salvation. It is a valuable way to stay in contact with our own conscience and our own individuality. Going beyond the emptiness and unease, one becomes  present to itself, able to fold into its interior world. The memory, as a filter, purifies our life from the pain. So the memory becomes a safe and comforting place to escape, because it is so intimate, vague and undefined.

SALVATORE SPORTATO - TABLEAUX SICILIANI

The tale of day to day life of Sicilians, a blow up into the character, ambivalences and attitudes of people, into the set and colours of the enchanting island Sicily is.

ROBERTO CRISTAUDO - ROUND TRIP

For most tourists, what you see on the way airport-hotel-airport, is the only true and real  thing, in the country visited. For the rest of the time, they remain closed in  the hotel or some touristic place,  where they often try to take pictures of the parts and details that are not real like the rooms, the restaurants and the staff. Roberto is a tour operator and has taken his main job as a starting point for his photography project.

ANA BLAGOJEVIC - RECOVERY

“My name is Ana Blagojevic. I was born in Belgrade in 1988. When I was three I came to Italy. I went back to the Balkans several times with a camera and I traveled around Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. I met with many young people there, who were once all Yugoslavians. Exploring youth culture in the culture I left behind, I tried to find my own personal story and create a small scrapbook.” Now I am working on two different dummies that I'd like to publish.

VANVAN CHEN - Slow Bus to Gaza

Ramadan 2013 was a revolutionary summer in Egypt and Palestine. Taking a slow bus from Cairo to Gaza, each life I met was full of confusion. The truth was far away from the scenes presented on television or newspapers. We are living in a world that we can hardly understand. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,’ so as Ludwig Wittgenstein, the German philosopher said. During the revolution people shout, while you still have to listen to the silence of confusion from every individual faces.

MARINA LORUSSO - Beyond the walls: the person is greater than his mistakes

The Apac structures are integral Brazilian penitentiary system, but parallel to the prisons; in these facilities operated by civilians and volunteers do not have the Prison Service and the prisoner began to be called "catching up". A fresh start on the path to recovery for these people where for the first time they are looked at through different eyes, new, more human.

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Masterclass 2011

MAKIKO - LUNCHBOX 365

Lunch Box 365 is an experimental project that started in my masterclass with Alex Majoli.

I took pictures of all the lunches I made for my son from January to December 2011 and put them together into one piece installation.

MARCO ZANELLA - THERAPY

This is not a project, this is just what I do when I am happy.

I have been taking these photos in the last 3 years, this is my therapy.

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Masterclass 2009

ITALO MORALES - OVERNIGHT GENERATION

Overnight Generation is a post-clash reportage about the complex shades that being young adults can assume in contemporary Sarajevo. A research on a fascinating, complex, and often unknown European capital, plagued by what has been acknowledged as the longest siege in modern history.

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PIER CASOTTI - SOMETIMES I CANNOT SMILE

Sometimes I cannot smile is a book of the wider Arctic Spleen project, a personal intimate journey inside the Greenlandic juvenile world where nature, violence, boredom and a strong cultural legacy have been claiming for decades the highest and saddest "toll". That of hundreds of young lives. It's a self funded project started in 2009.

VALERIO SPADA - GOMORRAH GIRL

Gomorrah Girl shows the struggle of becoming a woman in a dangerous, crime ridden area like the suburbs of Naples. Adolescence is almost denied, at 9 they dance, move and make themselves up as tv personalities and dream to become one of them. At 13 or 14, very often, they become mothers, skipping the adolescence which is lived fully everywhere else in Italy.

The book's storyline tells of Annalisa Durante who was killed by a stray bullet fired by a mobster. Spada's pictures are intertwined into the police report about her unfortunate death.

SALVATORE SANTORO - SALUTI DA PineTAMARE

Saluti da Pinetamare isn't a journalistic document about a single event or one theme, but it's a personal project about my home, the place from my own childhood. It's about what happened to these places.

Salvatore Santoro tried to explore the changes into the places of his childhood memories by making them collide with reality. The reality is that the direction taken by mankind, is far from reaching a better future which would leave children better off than their parents.