Niccolò Berretta, I Smelled the Spring on the Smoky Wind

Emanuele Mascioni Editore presents its first publication, Niccolò Berretta. I smelled the spring on the smoky wind, a monographic volume dedicated to the photographic artist Niccolò Berretta, edited by Giuliana Benassi.
This publication also marks the beginning of the publishing house’s story, founded with the aim of promoting a radical exploration of contemporary photography.

Rich in photographic material, the book weaves together images and texts to offer an oblique and incisive reading of the artist’s imagination.

Niccolò Berretta (Rome, 1986) is a photographic artist whose practice originates from an attraction to the street — understood as a transversal habitat of humanity that lives not on the margins but within the interstices and fissures of society, from the center to the periphery.
The “last ones” are the subjects Berretta favors — people living in uneasy positions within society, those marked by life, the borderline figures, those who dwell in the shadows, in solitude, who make obsession their existential paradigm, and who at the same time inhabit a state of picturesque opulence.
He is drawn to these figures by an anthropological impulse toward knowledge and the investigation of their specific environment. His work, in fact, begins long before the photographic act. It starts with a visual and human exploration of the context and takes shape through a network of relationships with local figures who guide him through places where the camera is often unwelcome — an undesirable guest. (from a text by G. Benassi)

The monograph is conceived as a multi-layered journey across the geography of cities and the world, punctuated by dates and by the artist’s own chronicle-like writings. It is structured in chapters that, like perspective and transversal immersions, narrate coherent bodies of work united by the common denominator of context and temporality.
Autobiographical notes alternate with critical and poetic texts by the contributing authors (Giuliana Benassi, Jessica, Hilary Kirk, Federico Lodoli, Giulio Squillacciotti, Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli).

Through the pages and the succession of photographs, a raw intimacy emerges that nonetheless leaves room for an undercurrent of ironic lightness.
Amid the streets of metropolitan spaces and the lesser-known recesses, the portrait of a visceral world comes to light — one in which contrast becomes beauty: I smelled the spring on the smoky wind.

Niccolò Berretta, I Smelled the Spring on the Smoky Wind