Portfolio
b. 1954 Carpi. Italia
For over 20 years, Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri’s work has focused on cities and their inhabitants. Barbieri’s photographs and his most recent films seem to exist between documentary and fiction. At first glance, the scenes we see in Olivo Barbieri’s photographs and films seem to be of detailed models. Through the manipulation of focus, by playing with the viewer’s sense of scale and distance, Barbieri redefines the sense of urban space. The city and its edges are watched from above; specific locations, some of them on our tourist maps, are somehow made unreal. The title of the project is site specific_. Really there is nothing site specific except the cities themselves, so there is a bit of a joke there, and it plays with the ideas of the site specific within art. Las Vegas and Rome were shot on 35mm film and Shanghai on High Definition Video, so they are very much film, although I think of them as works for galleries and museums. I added the titles and credits to make a fake real film.
OLIVO BARBIERI
