57 giorni di immagini
2022 - 2023

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 oone image per second, both day and night, without interruptions. 

57 giorni di immagini (57 Days of Images) is the result of a project commissioned by Camera - Italian Center for Photography, which invites artists to interact with the immense photographic archive preserved by the Alinari Foundation.

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 - closed in huge and unattainable boxes 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 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.

The results were an artist's book and an installation. The book features a sequence of 57 pairs of images, one for each day and one for each night, and all captions are written in chronological order, which does not correspond to the sequence of images. The installation presents 57 images, printed directly inside the same cardboard boxes used in the Alinari Archive for conservation. The captions are printed on the outside of the lid of each box.  Throughout the duration of the exhibition, all the boxes are being closed, day after day, so that the installation presents fewer and fewer images and more and more closed boxes, of which only the caption will be readable, leaving the viewer the choice to imagine the photograph here below, or open the lid and see if the image matches the caption. At the end of the exhibition all the boxes will be therefore closed.

The project was realized within Strategia Fotografia 2022, promoted by Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura and realized by CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia (Torino) and FAF Toscana – Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia (Firenze).