Also this year Padua hosts the new edition of the International Photojournalism Festival (IMP), the first event in Italy dedicated exclusively to this photographic genre. From 3 to 26 June the projects of about forty authors, Italian and foreign, will be exhibited in various places in the city.
Building on criticism from the World Press Photo Foundation, which runs the world‘s most important photojournalism award and which pointed out that photographers are generally less represented than their male counterparts, coupled with the tendency to still favor the works of Western authors, the festival it is committed to giving more space to women (about 70 per cent of the exhibitions) and to projects from all five continents.
One of the main exhibits is Of suffering and time by Darcy Padilla, who deepens her long story that began in the nineties in the Ambassador hotel in San Francisco, nicknamed “The aids hotel” because it housed the sick who had no home or family and whom the overcrowded hospitals refused to keep because there was nothing to be done to cure them but to administer morphine. From this experience was also born The Julie projecta fundamental work in long-term reportage, in which the American photographer followed the life of Julie Baird (one of the hotel guests) from 1993 until her death in 2010.
Gideon Mendel instead takes us between Australia, Greece, Canada and the United States, where since 2020 he has documented the fires that have devastated hectares of forests and put entire communities at risk. In Burning world the South African photographer prefers to arrive when the flames are extinguished and observe the impact of the environmental crisis on people’s lives.
Grozny: nine cities is an in-depth study carried out by three Russian photographers – Maria Morina, Oksana Yushko, Olga Kravets – on the complexity of contemporary Chechnya, since the end of the conflict with Russia in 2009. In Grozny the wounds and hatred sown by the war are masked by the centers of beauty, from SUVs and trendy bars, but dissent is not allowed and Russian tanks still parade along with the idolatrous supporters of President Ramzan Kadyrov.