Saggio visivo: Alice Angelini

Alice Angelini’s stories are contemplative and cinematic. She uses the familiar to lay narrative foundations, using shorthand for the viewer; setting the scene before the unexpected. In those chance images, Angelini shows us not only what she is looking at, but how she sees. 

The trope that a photograph is worth a thousand words is overstated, not wrong, but an oversimplication of both format and genre. Image is a language in and of itself and why we speak of image literacy, and learn how to read pictures as we would any nuanced text, veiled by metaphor.

Some images speak alone as single lines of poetry, others are the opening sentence of a novel, relying on the next, and the next. Building a narrative, something complex and changing, meaning contingent on sequence, on a syntax. For photographers, like Angelini, most interested in telling a story, they insist on their sequence as much as the images themselves.

The wider world is seen at a vantage that suggests both wonder and wariness, and in these scenes it’s difficult to get a sense of Angelini, lost to the landscape, but those specific spaces serve as a grounding in a time and place. Without them, the more intimate scenes appear apart from either.

Angelini is instead hyperpresent in moments of stillness, in times of looking– when it’s easy to imagine no one else is. Though these images are introspective, gentle, they are alive with her excitement at having made a discovery; a vase of flowers through obscure glass, both table, table cloth and blooms rendered like an impressionistic oil painting, a beckoning chasm, water droplets on the plastic seat of a boat.

Born in Rimini, Italy in 1997, Angelini experienced her education across countries and continents, Italy to the US–and an Associate’s Degree of Arts, the US to the Netherlands, where she earned a BA at the University of Amsterdam, unsurprisingly, in Linguistics.

Emerging, Alice Angelini’s work has been recognized by the renowned GUP Magazine in both the Fresh Eyes and GUP New format, as well as taking part in the first edition of Women in Art by Foto Lab Kiekie. As an Art Director she is a natural collaborator with the sensibilities of a meticulous world-builder.

As Angelini describes her practice, she is interested most in the interaction between counterparts: softness and strength, intention and spontaneity.

Her photography makes use of the ambience, saturation and nostalgia of film, and natural light true to the scene, wishing to draw the viewer with her into the emotional core of the image; the moment she had once occupied, she now shares with us.

Through all her work is a great honesty; she doesn’t make images happen, she finds the happenings to make into images. Here is the spontaneity of never being certain that the moment will arise, but the intention of knowing that if it does, she will be looking, and ready to see.

To view more of Alice Angelini’s work, check out her Format portfolio and follow her on Instagram.