The first monograph by Domingo Milella, curated by Fantom’s Francesco Zanot and published by Steidl, is a photographic journey from the artist’s hometown in the outskirts of Bari in southern Italy, taking us to Mexico City, Cairo, Ankara, Anatolia, Sicily, Tunisia, and as far as Mesopotamia.

“It’s hard to talk about photography without facing issues of time, memory and death – not as stereotypical archetypes, but as challenging and malleable entities of culture and nature.”  Domingo Milella.

Domingo Milella’s subject is cities and their borders, cemeteries and villages, caves and homes, tombs and hieroglyphs – in short, signs of man’s presence on earth.

His interest is the overlap between civilisation and nature, and how landscape and architecture are invested with individual and collective memory. These photographs emerge from and challenge classical ideas of landscape in art history, and seek an alternative iconography in which an almost forgotten past coexists with the present.

Says Milella: “Making images doesn’t only mean documenting or taking photographs. It’s also a possibility for contemplation and recollection. Building an image of the past is to face the present, and activate the possibility of the future.”

Domingo Milella was born in 1981 in Bari, Apulia, and today divides his time between his hometown and New York. At the age of eighteen Milella moved to New York to study photography at the School of Visual Arts (BFA 2005), where Stephen Shore was one of his teachers. Milella has worked with Massimo Vitali and Thomas Struth has been an influential mentor. Since 2001, he has been developing his landscape project. Milella has exhibited at Brancolini Grimaldi (Rome and London), Tracy Williams, Ltd. (New York), Foam photography museum (Amsterdam), the Venice Biennale and Les Rencontres d’Arles.

Read our conversation with Domingo Milella on the occasion of 2016 - Sulla nuova fotografia italiana. 
Domingo Milella was also featured in Fantom Issue 00. Summer 2009.

Domingo Milella
Steidl Books
Göttingen 2015
88 pages
Hardback / Clothbound 
www.steidl.de