We Have Learned to Distrust Images by Francesco Gioia

“I’m interested in the moment when an image becomes difficult to place; when something looks familiar, but you can no longer tell quite what you are looking at, or how it was made.” — Francesco Gioia

‘We Have Learned to Distrust Images’ is a vivid exploration of the tension between what an image appears to show, and how an image has actually been made. Working across photography and collage, Francesco Gioia brings together his own street photography with imagery and printed material he has discovered sifting through newspapers and magazines. Finding and selecting images, he cuts, combines and layers these fragments, transforming their original contexts before photographing the resulting collages.

At a time when images are increasingly difficult to distinguish as evidence, fabrication, documentation or something in between, the artist approaches this uncertainty through embracing an entirely physical and analogue process. Aware of our climate in which our relationship to the photographic image is shifting rapidly, Gioia’s images resist digital manipulation in favour of human touch, chance and a sequence of tangible decisions. The resulting photographs occupy an uncertain space between the familiar and the impossible, inviting us to look again at what an image might be and how it comes to be believed.