BRUNO CATTANI
“THE MEMORY BOX”
25th February to 26th March 2011

Opening reception: Thursday 24th February 2011 from 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm
The photographer will attend the opening
During the evening the book “Memorie” by Bruno Cattani will be presented.
Essays by Sandro Parmiggiani, Robert Poujade, Francesca Baboni, Stefano Taddei, Piergiorgio Paterlini, Mauro Bonaretti, Claudio Feruglio, - Ed. Umberto Allemandi & Co, 2010.

Maintaining the memories of places, faces, bodies, emotions. Assimilating and preserving them in a mysterious and imaginary box. Then for some arcane mystery, or a partly conscious stimulus, opening this box and giving them form again. Photography is one of the great accomplices of this “memory box"; the moment we take a photograph we relinquish a fragment of our life. "Of course we can never forget that photography, when claiming to rescue a piece of life and reality from the inexorable passing of time, it actually gives it to us fossilised, mere shreds of something that no longer exists." writes Sandro Parmiggiani.

It is clear that with this photographic research started several years ago on the memories of his hometown Reggio Emilia, Bruno Cattani does not only deliver memories. With indisputable mastery of the photographic technique and composition, with great sensitivity and a chromatic quietness he draws near to fragments, places, streets, corners. He moves around the games and toys of our childhood: the tricycle, the table-football, the carousel, the circus, Sundays in the park or summer by the sea, the football matches or the school excursions to the Civic Museum. He shows us the tensions and contradictions of our religion: the crucifixes in the churches and the vestries, those abandoned or those above the calendars of naked women lined up in a barber shop. He explores the crumbling ruins of abandoned buildings and the presence of an old psychiatric hospital or the disused Reggiane Factories.

By opening his “memory box” Bruno Cattani gives us the opportunity to open our own and reread its filtered history. Sandro Parmiggiani continues: “… photography, we might add, is not hammering away at stealing a fragment of reality exactly identical to a presumed truth, but knowing how to restore it, by a kind of transfiguration, in its essence of something always in relation to the world and the emotion of seeing……This is the photography that lasts, that, in a fragment of reality, is not afraid of confronting itself with artistic expressions possessing a far longer and solid tradition, one that can restore for us and maintain in time, the pulses of life and moments gone by.”


Technical info

The first images of this project were taken with the Polaroid 669 Polarcolor film. After the discontinuation of Polaroid instant film in 2008, Bruno decided to continue the project and use a digital camera and in some cases Photoshop. All photographs have been printed on Chromogenic paper and have been either framed traditionally or mounted on a d-bond support.


BIOGRAPHY

Bruno Cattani lives and works in Reggio Emilia
He started taking photographs in 1982 and is a photojournalist since 1988. In 1996 he took part in a photographic research on the museums of Reggio Emilia, starting his research on "Places of art." Over the years he received numerous research commissions in museums such as the Musée Rodin, the Musée du Louvre, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the National Institute for Graphics, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Archaeological Superintendence of Pompeii. He is one of the artists in the E 'D'après L’Antique exposition the Museum du Louvre and, in the same year, his show “Places of Art” is inserted into the program of the Mois de la Photo in Paris. In 2005 he began his research on memory unfolding like a journey seeking to revive the past with emotional and evocative narrative images
In the spring of 2010 this becomes an exhibition “Memorie” accompanied by a the book of the same name, curator Sandro Parmiggiani. He has takes part in the third edition of Reggio Emilia – Fotografia Europea. He is currently working for some of the most important Italian Architect Studios and hi sworks are part of the permanent collections of the Archives Photographiques du Musée du Louvre, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris,,the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Museo Archeologico Nazionale of Naplesi, Bibliotéque Nationale de France, Parisi, Musée Réattu  d’Arles, Musée de la photographie di Charleroi, Musée Nicephore Niéce Ville de Chalon sur Saône, Maison, The United States Museum of Photography, and the Museum of Thessaloniki (Greece).