Red Thistle

  • Davide Monteleone
Russia to the edges of the Empire, where Europe becomes Asia, and the birch trees give way to redwoods. The mountain range stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea traces the restless, misunderstood mosaic of the Northern Caucasus, which features in the media predominanty when the endless sporadic wars turn into massacres or genocides. In this inaccessible and inhospitable land, enclosed between two seas, Monteleone has found his theme. A scrupulous narrator, he follows the line drawn by “concerned photography”, and by linking images he constructs a narrative of places and people. In a geographic area as large and rugged as this, the morphology disappears into the fragments of a photograph formed in the perfect square of the medium format: it is forced to share the vision of the author, with no possibility of escape. The desire to tell a story is clear, far from being left to chance, there is a perfect coherence and continuity.