My two digital compositions, History Repeats and Angry Angels, come from travel photos of the Vittoriano in Piazza Venezia, Rome. The monument celebrates Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of a unified Italy. As with most of history's heroes and villains, his legacy is complicated. He rose to power on the Risorgimento, the popular movement for unification and freedom from tyranny, and the movement's own leaders later felt the common people had been abandoned in favor of the wealthy and connected. Decades later Mussolini's headquarters stood just across the piazza, and his government hung fascist symbols on the monument, symbols that were stripped away again after the war.
That same trip, boats full of people were being turned away from Italian shores, and the news was loud with a country deciding who got to stay and who didn't. I stood in that piazza with my camera and felt something old and familiar in the air. The tide of humanity turning inward, closing a hand instead of opening it.
The collision of present-day politics, historical memory, and the way history is retold through art stayed with me. Looking through my photos, I zeroed in on the elements and angles that captured that unresolved feeling. It took years of fiddling with the images: the right crop, layer upon layer of digital light, hard, vivid, not for beauty, but to hold the tension of two things at once.
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Original photo of the equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II, designed by Enrico Chiaradia and completed by Emilio Gallori in gilded bronze.
Original photo of Giulio Monteverde's Il Pensiero (The Thought), 1910, the winged central figure of the bronze allegorical group at the base of the Vittoriano, representing unity and freedom from tyranny.
