The Little Black Gallery reveals that Italian photographer Jacopo Paglione is the winner of its KIDS! KIDS! BOYS! Photography Competition with his series Milza.
The runners up, who were extremely applauded by the judges, were Michael Joseph and Callum Leo Hughes.
The young boys! BOYS! BOYS! Photography Competition becomes part of the platform from The Little Black Gallery devoted to promoting queer and gay fine art photography.
Images play a vital role in telling crucial stories, and photography has actually shown an effective force in inspiring and promoting the queer and gay community.
Jacopo’s series Milza, including his winning entry, appear in the new kids! BOYS! BOYS! The Publication Volume 5.
Whilst all the winning images by Jacopo, Michael and Callum function in the new BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! The Book to be published by Kehrer Verlag in April.
The judges were The Little Black Gallery co-founder Ghislain Pascal and professional photographers AdeY and Paul McDonald.
Ghislain stated: “The quality of entries was exceptional. So much so that not only are we now working with Joseph, Michael and Callum, however likewise 2 other professional photographers who entered the competition. There is so much skill out there and we are happy to offer our unique platform for queer and gay fine art professional photographers that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
Jacopo ´ s Milza series, including his winning entry, is now showing on kids! BOYS! YOUNG BOYS! at www.boysboysboys.org
‘The living type requires deep shadow if it is to appear plastic. Without shadow it stays a two-dimensional phantom, a more or less well brought-up child’. C. G. Jung, 1916
In the body, the spleen is the organ appointed to determine physical effort: it hurts after a long run, a strenuous journey, a winding climb. It is the spleen that alerts us about our state of discomfort when we are resting, or recuperating.
Jacopo Paglione’s subjects are surrounded by fixed, motionless, practically hieratic landscapes, yet in our perception the rush of their emotions, the shortness of their breath, their physical, emotional and cognitive stress emerges in all clearness. The nudity is used to underline their tense muscles or a brief moment of rest prior to the next immediate action, before their collision with the huge and hostile enclosing setting that calls, loudly, for a conflict, for a challenge with the darkest part of ourselves. Without this part, as very heavy and large as it is, we would be simply two-dimensional figures, squashed by the surrounding enormity.
The bodies portrayed in Milza, Italian for spleen, are, on the other hand, highly plastic, carnal; they do not capitulate when compared to the vastness of the surrounding environment they discover themselves in and, instead, as last guys in the world, alone and distinct, they require their presence in a wild and unwelcoming context– it does not matter whether natural or city, because it lacks any human presence: the artificial structures are deserted, abandoned, like they were never ever truly occupied.
Through photography Jacopo Paglione faces his own Jungian shadow, the one that requires us to handle our most concealed and horrific self. It climbs up down steep courses and over ruins, it crawls up preventing any root that might make it stumble along this course of linking the more and the less logical element of the self, the more and the less adequate. The strenuous territories that he chooses as background of his depiction are minutely studied and checked out, evaluated in every leaf and in every iron tube to get the exact internal landscape where his Shadow crashes into his Individual.
The detachment between the genuine body and the synthetic surroundings of the surrounding non-place results in his usage of light, that specifies the scene as a dreamlike area. Like a spotlight, it highlights the subject by stressing out his weakness or by describing an escape, a glimmer of possibility, of reconciliation. The dispute that occurs in the dream is the one in between the mindful Ego and the repressed self that declares acknowledgment and inclusion in a brand-new and brighter construction of the self.
Text by Martina Ronca
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