57 Days of Pictures

Iconic and legendary, the Alinari photographic archive contains 5 million images. “57 Days of Pictures” seeks to reinterpret this vast material, conveying an obsession with the gaze and a frustration at the impossibility of seeing everything.

57 days is how long it would take to look at all the 5 millions images collected in the Alinari Archive, if one were to look at one image per second, both day and night, without interruptions. 

“57 Days of Pictures” is the result of a project commissioned by Camera - Italian Center for Photography, inviting artists to interact with the immense photographic archive preserved by the Alinari Foundation. The result was an exhibition and an artist's book printed in an edition of 5, which I now wish to publish for a broader public.

The purpose of the work is twofold. On the one hand it tries to show the variety and unpredictability of the contents of the archive, on the other it tries to convey the feeling of impossibility inherent in it. Not only a physical impossibility –due to the fact of not being able to actually access a good part of the materials for storage reasons– but also and above all a temporal one. Namely, as mentioned at the beginning, the fact that it is impossible to take a look at all the photos in the archive.

This undertaking was instead accomplished in a less titanic way, sifting through all 223,940 digitized images present in the online archive, selecting those that best demonstrate the heterogeneity collected therein, and always cropping them in such a way as to exaggerate or subvert their meaning. The book features a sequence of 57 pairs of images, one for each day and one for each night. The captions were also collected, as evidence of the archiving methods, and then separated from the respective photographs, in order to try to stimulate in the viewer a sense of suspension, frustration or desire to reunite the pieces. For this reason, all the captions are shown in chronological order, mismatching the sequence of the book , which is not chronological.

An eerie and unsettling atmosphere pervades the entire sequence, where the uncanny seamlessly oscillates between irony and moments of stark violence. A sensation made possible by the incredible variety of content of the selected photographs, which tell the story of Italy and Europe, the story of their gaze on the rest of the world, the story of colonialism and wars, of the economic boom and scientific and technological progress, and, ultimately, the story of photography itself. Next to, and behind all this, a persistent allusion to the visual realm permeates many of the images, delving into the act of seeing itself and its paradoxical impossibility.

In order to publish the book, The Alinari foundation has signed an agreement to allow the use of their own images, granting the rights to the publisher for the publication of the book.