Editor: Jose Morales
Milan, Italy – The series THE PHOTOGRAPHIC PRAYERS by the Italian photographer Federico Cannata stems from two of his passions and aspects of his art: fashion photography and experimental poetry. Both become the one work of the other. That of creative writing is a constant that we find in every one of his works; it is a way to invite the viewer to join his poetry and then let everyone formulate a personal thought. Federico Cannata invents a timeless story imagining a disconsolate, sad man who is making a long journey around the world: a path that will lead him from darkness to light.
This man wants to improve his existence. His many mistakes lead him to seek a new mystical identity to idolize and to entrust his life to. To accelerate his research, he begins to whisper futuristic prayers, full of pathos, staging a sort of intimate conversation with new Madonnas 3.0. He is desperately looking for their eyes. He wants to steal their eyes. However, it is all complicated.
Cannata’s choice was to work on photographs taken from the “scraps” of his archive, images taken during his travels, or in the different Fashion Weeks between Milan and Paris, but due to “errors” of exposure or composition were never used for official publication. Thus, another theme emerges, that of recycling in the photographic field.
Every minute, thousands of images in the world are taken and stored in smart-phones or hard-disks, but in the second of a second, they are lost and never visited again. Federico Cannata thought of giving these photographs a new soul, a second life, another possibility to exist.
The Photographic Prayers turns out to be a hybrid photographic project, which gives a nod to the collage but is destined to be transformed into a pictorial work through graphic overlays, textures, copy and paste of graphic reworking’s, plays of color and a vertiginous mix of background images. They are destined never to exist again. The birth of these divine identities, still unknown, manage to dialogue with the contemporary man in a continuous search for a God.
Federico Cannata was born in Modica, Sicily, a place rich in history and cultural stratifications. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania with a degree in Graphic Design and then in Publishing, Federico Cannata started a series of important collaborations with artists, stylists, and international magazines, art galleries, and design companies. His work has been published in Vogue Italia and Vanity Fair, just to name a few. Cannata has been the only Sicilian photographer chosen for the prestigious Prada Journal Prize, opening the doors for those who look up to his work.
His style is characterized by a mix of different cultures, with a pop-vintage look, never predictable, and always in constant evolution. – GM
Your hands are very sweet,
intoxicating your senses:
eternal recall.
Wherever you are, I will remember
that shine more than
midday light.
Your eyes seek,
and they look for me.
Your breath holds and
governs me, even alone
with artificial thoughts.
Your eyes search, investigate.
Your eyes seek.
They look for stars and find gems,
they want lawns and touch perfumes,
looking for butterflies and
they find distant planets.
Your eyes look for why not
you want to return what you are.
Those were your stories
destined to die?
Your eyes seek.
They look for your face
and find a dark extinct,
they want your hands
and find canvases again
to paint.
Your feelings begin
to tell the stories of the clouds
and breaths ruined by the wind.
Your eyes seek.
They look for a heart that
knows how to beat too
when around you the day is night.
Your eyes seek
fences from which to escape
and find comets
to dance to.
Eyes to be invented.
Eyes to be sanctified.
Your eyes seek.
They look for flowers
and find stones,
they want air bubbles
and find plastic lies.
If you steal the last of my dreams,
you could light up the rays
of what you called a crown.
Your journey begins
with light, with stone waves
that break down on strips of color.
Indulgences without ending,
without judging, without memories to spread.
Your eyes, ours, seek.
Your eyes seek.
They look for tears and find rays of sunshine,
they look for pretexts and find petals in love.
Your eyes search on long pink lawns
new messages for not
escape more.
GUILD MAGAZINE - THE FASHION ISSUE
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