The Big Chill is a photographic series shot in New York during the hardest days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The images portray a suspended city, pervaded by cold, silence, and a human rarity that transforms the urban space into a mental landscape even before it becomes an architectural one. The buildings, streets, and intersections become immobile bodies; the human presence, when it appears, is marginal, fragile, almost accidental.
Time seems to have contracted, frozen in a horizonless wait. There's no commentary or emphasis, but rather a gaze that observes the West while holding its breath. A work designed for collectors and enthusiasts of contemporary photography, it questions the city as a symbolic place and emptiness as a political and emotional form.
GIANLUCA VASSALLO
ARTIST / AUTHOR
2021
YEAR OF PRODUCTION
WHITE BOX STUDIO
PRODUCER
ED. 50+1
SPECS
F/A ENGLISH PAPER
SUPPORT
FINE ART PRINT
TECHNIQUE
Photography today, still?
In the age of generative/numerical imagery, for us, photography, understood as an author's gaze on reality or dreams, is a meaningful choice. It means restoring centrality to the time of observation, to the filter of humanity, the photographer, and the audience. It means acknowledging the possibility that the gaze may stumble, deviate, or fail, and that these influences may determine the new, the unexpected.
For us, producing and selling photography ultimately means trying to bring into the world the beauty produced by the relationship between man and reality, between man and where the dream dwells: that is, anywhere outside of codes, outside of what is written.
