ALESSANDRA SPRANZI

The artistic research of Alessandra Spranzi is connected with photography, with photographic staging, the reuse of images of her own or taken by others, collage and “photographs of photographs.” Her work reveals a taste for humble materials, everyday situations, domestic settings, neglected and obsolete objects, handiwork and its gestures. Through these tools and these subjects, through appropriations and even minimal manipulations, Spranzi neverstops questioning the mystery of existence and the fundamental forces that determine our fate, as well as that of the objects and spaces that surround us.

«Though she shows photographs, Alessandra Spranzi is not a photographer, but an artist who uses photography. This distinction might seem cavillous, or even obsolete: it dates back to the 1970s and has gradually lost its aptness to describe the evolution of the photographic language. But in Spranzi’s case it can be useful.

Most of her works do not feature original images shot by Spranzi, but recycle images of others taken from practical manuals, science books, classified ads. They are photographs Spranzi has collected over the years, selected and then reutilized in a dif- ferent way: rephotographing them, cutting, enlarging, printing with techniques that differ from those used to make the original image, or at times using them as the start- ing materials for a collage. What interests her is to point out a beauty that was already lurking, unseen, in existing images: anonymous photographs, not made by profession- als, or in any case made without artistic ends.

Courtesy P420