Portrait: Honorable Mention 2019 (professional)
ENTRY DESCRIPTION
I arrived at the 1960s home in an outer Sydney suburb built by my 95-year-old Nonno to catch up over a coffee.
As I knocked on the back door his lonely figure, full of confusion, approached and I grabbed my camera to capture a raw, natural shot, full of emotion.
He had once been a partisan fighting the Nazis in the Italian Alps but was now trapped in a body of dementia, caught in a web of fear.
The flyscreen door is a symbol of entrapment. The door is a portal to a lost world, one that he had retreated from. But it also closets dementia from us, the community.
This was probably the last image I took of him.
AUTHOR
Emilio Cresciani is an artist and freelance photographer and lives and works in Sydney, Australia. He graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2012.
His artwork explores redundancy and urban change. His interest is in objects, structures, buildings and the urban landscape, and in particular the increasing number of ‘non-places’ that fill our environment. Waste centres, derelict service stations, road works, car parks and abandoned factories. Beauty is found in these places of repulsion, neglect or obsolescence. Inverted images of rubbish emphasise the negative side of consumerism, like an x-ray points out disease. Portraits of people with their weekly waste explored Italo Calvino’s suggestion that we are defined by what we dump. Cracked car windows and night road works are a metaphor for the central place roads play in capitalism.
Recent media coverage of his art work has included the Daily Telegraph, Sydney Morning Herald, Canberra Times and City News; Parramatta Road project on ABC TV News; and the Daily Telegraph; and his exhibition " Flight Patterns" in the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. [see News]
He is represented by The Photography Room, Canberra.
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