Matteo Di Giovanni - True Places Never Are (signed)

The Ice Plant 2024

From 2013 to 2023, Matteo Di Giovanni (b.1980) embarked on several rambling photographic journeys, off the beaten path, through Italy, Scandinavia and Northern Europe — gnoseological roadtrips, you might call them, in which map and territory gave way to intuition and curiosity, a method of knowing the outer world through attentive observation and image-making. True Places Never Are reconsiders and re-sequences this decade of Di Giovanni’s medium-format photographs (initially released as three standalone photobooks), adding several previously unpublished images and framing it afresh as a single body of work in which the specifics of location and chronology are secondary to the intangible meanings and associations only the camera can suggest — for both photographer and viewer. The landscapes here seem intimate and mythic; the still lifes feel vast and open; interiors and exteriors are curiously interchangeable. And, as in Moby Dick (the source of the book’s title), a sense of water pervades — a seascape, an icecap, a bank of fog — as our protagonist restlessly chases a something — home, self, truth — that might ultimately be elusive.

96 pages / 240 x 290 mm / Paperback + Jacket
50 color images

ISBN 979-8-9857330-1-3