Biography

CURRICULUM VITAE

Sergio de Benedittis (Napoli 1959), is a photographer since his late teens. He studied photography and visual arts at Rome's Istituto Europeo di Design where in 1986 he graduates in Advanced Professional Photography. The following year he starts Kaos, his first professional workshop in Rome and Studio Contesto Fotografia in Naples and begins his continuing contributions to magazines and newspapers and his work as graphic and photography consultant for websites, and as photography and visual effects director for theatre and videos. In his continuous search for the interaction between image in motion, time and existence, Sergio has then directed his interests to the production of shorts and videos.

Since 1997 Sergio de Benedittis runs his personal course on creative photography at his Naples studio, Corso di Fotografia e Sopravvivenza Visiva (Photography and Visual Survival Course), currently at its 22nd series, while teaching photography at several other institutes. His latest achievement is NIGMAFOTOGRAFI ASSOCIATI, a cultural project he has realized - in association with an active group of his former students - to train professional photographers and promote events pertaining to photography, photographic design and to the realization of graphic images.

NIGMAFOTOGRAFI ASSOCIATI realizes and promotes exhibitions, projections of photographic images and presences, and encourages the social and cultural exchange between producers, operators and the final users.

Having abandoned advertising photography since 1994, Sergio de Benedittis has then devoted himself to conceptual photography with several solo and collective exhibitions. His subjects are inevitably the human figure and its surroundings, street -or social- photographs, portraits, objects and places with a history.

His work brings into question and challenges the passing and the existence of time itself, through the immutable traces left by the human being. All events evolve around the photographic image as subject, often projected in settings not usually deputed to photography, places "where the image might meet the observer as by chance, thus creating a significant relation between the image, the observer and space. A photo on a wall is otherwise quite pointless".

NOLI SAURA OBLIVISCERE SAURUM

In the context of FotoGrafia, the International Festival of Rome (April/May 2007), on May 11, at 6,30 pm at Biblioteca Angelica will open the new solo exhibition of Sergio de Benedittis: NOLI SAURA OBLIVISCERE SAURUM (will the lizard never forget its having been a fish). Common objects, often seen and used, age easily to our eyes and we tend to forget their original and fundamental function in our every day life. All the objects shown in this exhibition are so ancient that they still retain their latin names. Natural products or man created items that have shared their existence with man through ages and cultures and still retain today their basic aspect and function and still fulfil perfectly their original purpose. Things that only represent themselves and continue to assert their evocative power against time. To confirm their unchanging energy it might be useful to look at them from above, hanging in thin air, to learn from them and to listen to what they can tell us of our past. Things that can still convey emotions. The images on exhibition are bound in 15 identical volumes, in the literary and printing style of the seventeenth-century, for the visitors to leaf through the images at ease, sitting at a table in the superb scenery of Rome’s Biblioteca Angelica, and through the history of these 59 objects collected and bound together as in the pages of an ancient encyclopaedic text. The more the pages will show the signs of the visitors who thumbed through them, the more the objects will gain eternity and will survive to the passing of time.

The opening of NOLI SAURA OBLIVISCERE SAURUM will be preceded by a short tiatro introduction by Giulio Perri with Luca Ruocco.

59 objects photographed in black & white on 10x12 film, printed with carbon pigmented ink on 100% cotton paper made by Cartiere Magnani of Pescia and adapted to ink-jet printer by ACSAF (Florence) and realized by ECCO of San Gimignano. The 59 prints are bound in a cm. 33x48 volume of 66 pages printed in 15 numbered copies and one single 50x70 copy.

All photographs are for sale (complete volume printed in 15 numbered copies or single images)