Presenting itself as a research on portraiture, a genre dear both to the classical tradition of Fine Arts and to the history of photography, Locals, edited by Roberto Maggiori, is a book that collects and presents through a selection of works and authors a serie of “antispectacular” or unconventional portraits.
Gathering and comparing 27 authors whose practice is photographic even when the support that holds the image is different from the photographic one (ceramic, canvas, a simple squared sheet), Maggiori offers us an interesting insight of Italian photography, and of the postures and practices that we can encounter as we approach it. An overview or a gathering around itself that embraces historicized authors as younger voices.
A freedom that precisely by virtue of this generosity, constitutes both a story of the authors and their linguistic experiments, as much a story of the territory that their living inevitably creates.
Referring for a subject such as the photographic portrait the possibility of an authorial development that avoids the spectacular dimension of the tradition of this genre and language, the authors collected by Roberto Maggiori, each with their own linguistic and intellectual peculiarities, tell the possibility of reasoning and discuss the ideas of portraiture as a genre and of the photographic practice itself, which, precisely by virtue of the centrality it increasingly occupies in communication, becomes a subject around which it is urgent to produce interesting reflections like this.

Photographs by:
Nino Miglior, Italo Zannier, Guido Guidi, Mario Cresci, Paolo Gioli, Roberto Salbitani, Cesare Ballardini, Piero Delucca, Fabio Torre, Alessandra Dragoni, Fabio Sandri, Cuoghi Corsello, Michele Buda, Sabrina Ragucci, Luca Gambi, Jacopo Benassi, Marcello Galvani , Nicola Albertin, Federico Pacini, Francesco Neri, NASTYNASTY ©, Salvatore Santoro, Allegra Martin, Marco Dapino, Fabrizio Bellomo
Text: Roberto Maggiori