The jury of this edition has selected as World Press Photo of the Year the image of the Danish photographer Mads Nissen, The First Embrace, in which the eighty-five-year-old Rosa Luzia Lunardi, after five months of isolation, is embraced for the first time, albeit through a plastic curtain, by the nurse Adriana Silva da Costa Souza, in the Viva Bem rest home in Sao Paulo in Brazil.
There will also be a section dedicated to Italian artists. Between these, Antonio Faccilongo, winner of the World Press Photo Story of the Year with Habibi, a report on sperm smuggling into Israeli prisons by Palestinian prisoners and their families, who want to preserve their reproductive rights. (Cover photo)
In addition to Faccilongo, which also won first prize in the category Long-Term Projects, the works of two other Italian authors will be highlighted: Gabriel Galimberti, first prize in the category Portraits, Stories with the project The American Guns, on the possession of weapons in the USA e Lorenzo Tugnoli, first prize in the category Spot News, Stories with Port Explosion in Beirut, on the explosion in the port of Beirut in Lebanon in August 2020.
From 4 September to 3 October 2021, the historic headquarters of Villa Bottini welcomes the reportage Bitter Leaves that Rocco Rorandelli (1973), a member of the TerraProject collective, conducted between India, China, Indonesia, the United States, Italy and many other countries, to report the impact of the tobacco industry on people's health, the economy and the environment.
Rorandelli's investigation takes the visitor to tobacco fields and medical centers, factories, museums and customs structures, to clarify the vast network that regulates and links industry and the human and environmental context. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Riaperture Festival and the Fondazione Studio Marangoni.
Rorandelli's images dialogue with a selection of photographs, conserved in the Lucchese Photographic Archive "A.Fazzi", which illustrates the history of the Manifattura Tabacchi di Lucca, the factory which was one of the reference points in the economic history of the city and which welcomed an almost exclusively female workforce.
On the same dates - from 4 September to 3 October 2021 - it is also held at Villa Bottini Foul and Awesome Display, a production of Fotografia Europea Reggio Emilia curated by Francesco Colombelli, which offers a series of photographic books able to analyze how the development of combat weapons has gone hand in hand with that of the most modern technologies.
The path ideally opens with a historical section that illustrates the first uses of war photography with volumes by Roger Fenton and Alexander Gardner (Garder's photographic sketch book of the Civil War, 1865), then we move on to aerial photography – Memories d'un Géant (2015) by Nadar – and its application to warfare, con The Great War seen from the air in the Flanders Fields (Birger Stichelbaut, 2014), The Pigeon Photographer (Nicolò Degiorgis, 2018), Zeppelin world-fahrten (I and II, 1933-36).
One part is dedicated to the atomic bomb, from Picturing the Bomb which remembers the Manhattan Project (Harry N. Abrams, 1995), to the epochal volumes of Shomei Tomatsu (Nagasaki 11.02 August 9, 1945) and Ken Domon (Don't forget Hiroshima!), up to those who investigate the consequences of nuclear weapons, with Atomic Ed (Janire Najèra, 2018), Anecdotal(David Fathi, 2015), Silent Hisotries (Kazuma Obara, 2014) e Chronicles of an atomic bombing (Maquis editions, 1985). The review closes with American Origami (Andres Gonzales, 2019) e Useful photography 11 (KesselsKramer, 2016), a reflection on the constant increase in the spread of weapons among civilians, especially in the western area.
To complete the itinerary, a series of images taken from the Giampiero Brancoli Fund, from the Lucchese Photographic Archive “A. Fazzi”, which collects over 6.000 images, among which an important nucleus on the Russian Campaign stands out, in which Brancoli had taken part with the ARMIR (Italian Army in Russia).
The images taken in Russia by Giampiero Brancoli portray snow-covered landscapes and desolate inhabited centers which convey to the observer the sense of absolute silence and narrate the daily life of the local populations, especially women and children. Next to them, there are those relating to military operations, the atrocities of war and ordinary moments of military life shared with other men, who have become companions of a unique experience. Very suggestive are the portraits, often accompanied by handwritten notes on the photographic prints, in which people are introduced and moments of common life are described, such as rest, a meal, shaving, playing cards, joking and lightheartedness.
“The Photolux program – he says Chiara Ruberti, co-director of Photolux -, in this complicated year, it is enriched and completed. The two exhibitions that investigate, from different angles, the effects of the spread of the pandemic in Lucca and in Italy, are joined by the one presenting the winners of the World Press Photo which, after sixteen years of continuity, precisely the pandemic had prevented the .
