Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan
ReGeneration - 50 Fotografi di domani
"reGeneration" was born of an idea to look into the future. The Musée de l’Elysée was celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2005, and rather than look backward to its accomplishments, it decided to look forward by the same number of years. The question was then: how to imagine what photography would be like in 2025? Today, with the digital revolution in full swing, it’s anyone’s guess; indeed, the rate of mutation is such that even the word photography might by then seem wholly anachronistic. Selected from 400 candidates submitted by more than sixty of the world’s top photography schools, reGeneration presents the work of 50 young photographers. Rather than looking for new directions the aim was to identify talented, promising, and committed young photographers, and in numbers sufficient to give a sense of where the next generation was headed.
What ties these fifty young photographers together? Curiosity, inventiveness, the rejection of traditional genres (no nudes to speak of, no traditional portraiture, no street photography, very little on the figure, no heroic landscapes, no decisive moment). A world in colour, it goes without saying, and a world of doubt, uncertainty, and even dread. But it is immensely gratifying to see that these doubts are not crippling the reGeneration photographers: on the contrary, they seem to have been energized by them.
The catalogue, "reGeneration - 50 Photographers of Tomorrow", published by Thames & Hudson, is a bestseller. It is used as a reference book for many photography students and collectors, and is available in English, French, Japanese and Korean.
