Undoubtedly venturing from the path first trodden by Roland Barthes among others, Susan Sontag pierces the heart of the nature of photographs, for them to be tracks of the that-has-been, evidence of a persona or inanimate object. It is in these premises that Attilio Solzi’s “The Absence” finds a breeding ground for exchange. Thus, the artist’s book is a year-long documentation of an empty sex worker’s chair along the road that connects the cities of Milan and Cremona, in Northern Italy. Solzi’s records are both the physical evidence of a sex worker’s presence at night and their absence in the early mornings or afternoons. Like a forensic photographer, he objectively examines the scene substantiating the presence of an unknown person beyond their present belongings.

The gaze finds pleasure in the repetition of the white object-chair, sometimes seen from a distance, some others intruded from up close. Although the context is given, viewers could think of any place and the work of the imagination still acts upon the spontaneous scenes which resemble stages from the Theatre of the Absurd. Indeed the meaningless shapes here the narrative in the form of waste items that articulate time over an immutable and suspended non-place. The waste abandoned down the days around the chair slowly turn into tokens, and per se, they stand as metaphors of the discarded condition of sex workers. The photographs seem to reinforce the notion that sex workers are waste belonging to non-places, while simultaneously inviting a neutral gaze that undresses the minimalism of the images to the bone examining them as a mere composition exercise.