The international jury, composed of Olivo Barbieri, Paola de Pietri, Marco Delogu, Francesco Graziadei and Walter Guadagnini, selected Alessandro Calabrese from the many entrants as winner of the fifth edition of the Graziadei Studio Legale Prize for Fotografia.

The project presented by Alessandro Calabrese, A Failed Entertainment, is freely inspired by David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest (A Failed Entertainment was the book’s working title) and compares the concept of auteurship in the production of photography with its counterpart, the widespread proliferation of visual material available online.

Calabrese’s work is the direct result of the use of the Google Images search tool (which uses an algorithm to identify images online that are visually similar to a first example), to which he uploaded film photographs taken in Milan between 2012 and 2015. The original shots are sacrificed and literally ‘swallowed up’ in a constant overlapping of the results produced by the search, creating new images composed of a random number of anonymous photographs and those taken by the photographer. The piece loses itself in a growing and potentially infinite mathematical reproduction.