Soil
Vittorio Mortarotti
A perplexing book, Vittorio Mortarotti’s new publication Soil, released this year by Skinnerboox, hints at, amongst other topics, lives lived at the margins of political existence. It does this without ever pushing an obvious agenda or confirming the bias.
[…] Instead, it is a personal series of observations woven together like a fine tapestry, edited and sequenced with a formalist approach to repetition, serial images, and motifs that make the book experience otherworldly, psychologically loaded with the author as much as what he photographs. This inner excavation, the assembly of aggregate character traits, is the basis for what we see and relate. In this, the book is a complete success and falls in line with a general trend away from telling stories toward sharing visions.
[…] Instead, it is a personal series of observations woven together like a fine tapestry, edited and sequenced with a formalist approach to repetition, serial images, and motifs that make the book experience otherworldly, psychologically loaded with the author as much as what he photographs. This inner excavation, the assembly of aggregate character traits, is the basis for what we see and relate. In this, the book is a complete success and falls in line with a general trend away from telling stories toward sharing visions.
