FIFTY ONE
51 Possible Stories. The idea behind this book is based on my desire to breathe life back into something that could, in some way, be re-elaborated, in the same way that a DJ re-mixes sound clips. All this began with the exploration of a few images from their original context – advertising, personal photographs, casing shots, location searches, etc. – (re)treating them as fragments of a discussion or stories that this book only intends to suggest, leaving those who wish to flip through its pages the possibility of interpreting them according to their own personal sensitivities or fantasies.
Federico is a director. Federico is a brilliant director that makes ads. He manages to wrap the product being sold in an aura that is mysterious, epic or fleetingly poetic. The world of advertising deals with the art of the immediate and, by its very nature, it is light and fast. We consume it rapidly, often distractedly. Its lifespan is extremely short. The place of contemporary life forces us to accept a fast and constantly changing rhythm, as we cause after the latest trend, which continually reinvents and renews itself. To quote a slogan from one of Brugia’s commercials “suddenly everything looks older” – Bartolomeo Pietromarchi
Flipping through the images in this book we become lost in an indistinct stream of fleeting moments that pass between the real and they fictitious, from real life to its media representation.
On each page of this book, Brugia has arranged the images in an almost a-tonal chromatic composition that suggests a mood, an a motive atmosphere: intimate, nocturnal, hidden and lost.
We are surrounded by images: ugly, beautiful, communicative, vulgar, personal and amateurish. An immense production of images which are also easily manipulated by computer. Immediacy is now understood as the absence of a form of mediation that we are almost obliged to accept.
What does it mean today when I tell people that I work with “images”? If I look at the enormous quantity of frames that I have accumulated in recent years, I have the impression that “my” image seem to have lost their autonomous value of expression; in the best examples, they represent my personal view of things, my attempt to create order in the world.
Many of the images are low-quality, taken with a telephone, or stills from a webcam… Images that could have been taken by anyone and yet, when placed together, they acquire a new meaning, like evidence in an investigation that slowly forms the outline of a possible future.