551 Madison Avenue New York

Author: Alberto Damian
Language: Bilingual Italian and English
Format: Hard cover, 21x18cm, 144 pages
ISBN: 978-88-31403-03-0
First edition: September 2020

** In US available on Sunset&Venice

"This book, indeed this diary, contains an image caught in a portion of extraneousness, the recovery of walking people, inactive and disconnected bodies and faces, slipped along a road, whispering silences typical of going, of the relationship between the body that moves and the role of which the road is invested; be it symbolic or simulated. A threshold or, better to say, a sort of interzone through which the body is the protagonist of the case as an invisible engine of the intertwining of our lives and of the evocative power of the image, capable of triggering the snapshots of the imagination.

Through his photographic lens, Alberto Damian it seems to want to discover an exact coordinate as an observation point, choosing to let go ignoring the degree of north latitude or that of west longitude in which it is trapped. 'His' looking, in this adventure, is looking at faces and people and people who don't look, he looks and films people who pass, from a single place, a single fraction of time, and looks without being looked at. See without being seen. What he proposes, therefore, is a sort of 'theft': resumes the defenseless exhibition of passers-by without the possibility of posing."

“When all that is called Art he was full of rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousand candles of his lamp, and the sensitive paper gradually absorbed the black cut out of some common object. He had invented the strength of a tender cool flash which surpassed all the constellations in importance intended for our visual pleasures.”

Tristan Tzara

The photographs in this book were made in New York between 12:44 and 12:59 on September 28, 2017, on the sidewalk of the 551 of Madison Avenue. I photographed almost all the people who, in those 15 minutes, passed quickly between me - who was standing half a meter from the edge of the sidewalk - and the building, except those who passed while I was changing the camera battery. The book collects practically all the shots taken, in their original chronological sequence.