STATEMENT

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Annalisa Gonnella is blessed and cursed with the hunger that it takes to be a photographer…. ever since I met her it was clear that she had a multi associative mind which easily translated to the language of the eye….. her camera was but a tool for her to organize the instantaneously transient phenomena into the poetic codes which we call photographs….. she has studied at ICP in New York and has become a friend of mine with a terrible appetite for critique… she wants to expand her talent and her vision so bad that it teeters on being blinding..

she works with ravenous avidity.. with a sensual hunger and a philosophical oblique… a winning combination when it come to creating historical and visual metaphors….

any work that she will endeavor will be made to feel more alive from her participation…

Prof Larry Fink

Bard College

NY

Annalisa Gonnella studied photography with me at The International Centre of Photography in New York City. The class, “ Street Photography: Poetic Witness”, as the title indicates was about making pictures as the students were living their lives in the city. Annalisa’s work consistently stood out during the class critiques. Sometimes they were the better pictures in the class and in other instances they were not. What was impressive is that they were always the pictures that showed the most courage in their execution and construction. Annalisa is always pushing the envelope with her photography. I believe a major reason for her working in such a manner is because of her previous studies as a student of philosophy. She works with the mind of a philosopher and the eye of a photographer when she has camera in hand.

Barron Rachman

Faculty

International Centre of Photography

New York City

ABOUT THE ART

The mind-blowing aspect of photography is still, as it was in its origin, the fragile and short state of being of an irreducible instant. What interests me is approaching this moment by merging with it. It is not what is in the photo, not the moment it captures, but rather its happening. The origin—in my native language, Italian—provenienza: how it came into being, then leaving a provisional track before its fast and subsequent disappearance. I observe from the inside rather than moving from subject to subject. I intend to bypass the scientific/analytical participation where the observer is taken out of the environment. Instead, listening with the eyes and with desire by being seemingly inattentive, it is possible to meet the moment, but in contretemps: letting a picture emerge in the space of my imagination. Paradoxically, through this unattended emergence, what I can see at glance takes me to the missing pieces that are hidden in every image seen. I try to record this edgy gap. This is what my photography without a subject aims to highlight. It is an attempt to make a link with what has been covered by the process of deliberate seeing. A link to what we pass every day, but do not attend to. My project is, above all, a study of phenomenology.

A collage of colors and shapes found throughout my photographs can thus be regarded as an answer to the voice of the different languages of the elements working together.

For me every picture is an open question; I desire to experiment under the spell of overflowing information to see how much fertile and the elastic is the space of the photography. I listen to what is regarded as mere noise, to more finely tune it, to liberate a voice to emerge. Every element has equal nobility. Each of them plays a part in the deconstruction of the image. At the same time they collaborate to liberate the unique soul at its core.

For this

My research firstly hears photography as an exploration of the edges of different contemporary arts languages. My visual theme originates from the needs of translating through photography a range of pulsions, to taste the vision in a sensitive way. My photography is an attempt to see things behind the assigned meaning, outside the habit of view as a practice to let the reciprocal interaction emerge. This interaction is referred to a musical, tonal order first of all. It is during the vital experience inspired by art that I find first the possibility of imagine composition, well before its construction: the figures, indeed, grow up by following its own way. It’s interesting to see the interaction between gestures and photography as a witness. In fact, photography isn’t an images recording, but reality’s poetic witness, an originative process that transform, search transformation to find reality. This also suggest the thinking about truth, reality and immediacy conception in photography.