JOCHEM SCHONEVELD, ROME LOST AND FOUND
FOTOGRAFIA, INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL FROM ROME TO LABÌCO
The 12th FOTOGRAFIA will involve the whole city this year as in the past: foreign academies, institutions, and private galleries will form a true circuit in Rome dedicated to contemporary photography. The Valle Fredda Resort hosts the show of Jochem Schoneveld, Rome Lost and Found, curated by Marco Delogu, until 8 December 2013.
In the 16th and 17th centuries many northern European artists would travel to Italy to study Renaissance art and the remains of ancient Rome, producing huge numbers of drawings of Roman ruins, landscapes, monuments, and the countryside outside Rome. Jochem Schoneveld, using these drawings as a starting point, has photographed Rome and its surrounding area. The photographs are of the same places as the drawings: the map coordinates and the light are the same, but the architecture and the space are changed.
Forms have been destroyed to be replaced by others, such as noises, odours, the atmosphere of the time, the history of the place, unseen aspects that Schoneveld manages to represent in his work. The photos are freely based on the drawings.
The photographer is not seeking a nostalgic vision of Rome, but on the contrary captures the city as it is today.
The photographs themselves depart from a formal approach with a strong attention to spatial depth. There is always a direct relationship between the foreground and the background elements, brought out by the depth of field. The photos are sharp from 1 metre to infinity.
Within the confines of these formal compositions, the humans, the animals, and the means of transport are like arbitrary actors on a stage. Thus the controlled compositions mingle frequently with the movement and gestures, elements outside the control of the photographer, to become a phenomenological description of a framed reality.
Jochem Schoneveld (Netherlands, 1973) is a photographer whose work is characterized by particular attention to the human-altered landscape. His work has been displayed at such festivals as “Fotografia, Festival Internazionale di Roma” and numerous galleries in Italy and the Netherlands, and has been published in such international periodicals as “Le Monde”. He teaches photography at John Cabot University, Rome.
