Fotografia Calabria Award 2023 – Winners

CHANGE is the central theme of our competition, for photographers of all ages and from all over of the world. We seek photographic projects that tell the declinations this process can have: individual or collective, environmental or technological, small or macroscopc, cultural or scientific, conscious or instinctual, predictable or sudden. 

Filippo Ferraro with “Wooden diamonds” is the Calabria Festival Photography Competition’s first classified. 

A project that stood out for the images’ quality , but above all for its adherence to the theme of the competition, which takes shape both in its content and in the design development of a research work born and grown over time. It is a story of destruction, but also of hope that makes us look to the future with optimism.  

‘Wooden diamonds’ tells of the olive trees epidemic in Salento, 10 years after it began. An environmental disaster that caused the death of more than 20 million trees, but also resulted in the loss of identity symbols handed down from generation to generation in the local population. Today, however, the hope for a better future is once again sprouting thanks to the replanting of some olive trees’ varieties and the commitment of the farmers and some local associations who are making to bloom to a new beauty, something that was thought lost, but that had always remained vivid in the memories of each one of them. 

Bio

Born in 1990, Filippo Ferraro is an Italian documentary photographer. His research is mainly focused on the relationship between the man and the environment and its continuous change in the global scenario of climate changes, with particular attention to the related issue of collective cultural identity. His work has received over the years recognitions in various international awards, including the Andrei Stenin International Press Photo Contest and has been exhibited and screened in various international festivals. 

Toma Gerzha is the second classified of the Photography Calabria Festival 2023′ s  Competition with her project “Ctrl+R”. The Russian photographer’s work was appreciated first and foremost for the delicacy with which she managed to deal with the Change’s theme  by placing young Russians and their current affairs at the centre of her narrative, but also for the sophistication with which she used the photographic medium as narrative tool.  

“Ctrl+R” has Russian Zoomers, i.e. the young people of the so-called Generation Z, as its protagonists. Born in the year 2000, they are therefore the first post-Soviet generation that grew up in the middle of the digital and completely Putin-like age. Toma Gerzha highlights the contradictions of a society that has only half experienced the change of the digital revolution: on the one hand the big cities, on the other the provinces where the culture stopped at the 1990s. A generation that, despite today’s media, has little interest in politics and thus remains immobile without any desire for real change. 

Bio

Toma Gerzha grew up in Moscow, but her family moved to the Netherlands in 2009. She graduated in Photography from the Dutch Academy for Visual Creation in 2019. Gerzha gained public attention with her solo exhibition “Nameless people, nameless country” in 2022 at C-LAB Art Gallery in Amsterdam. 

Juliana Gòmez Quijano with ‘The two Strands’ is the third classified of the Photography Calabria Festival 2023 Competition . Her work, which consists of portraits of homozygous twin couples, was awarded especially for the originality with which the theme of Change was tackled.  

“The two Strands” starts from an autobiographical story to investigate the universal changes to which individuals are subjected due to the many environmental and social factors that characterise our existence. Changes that affect the individuals despite being the genetic photocopy of someone else. 

Bio

Juliana Gòmez Quijano is a photographer interested in investigating and reflecting on the molecular and symbolic connections that unite us as a species. Her projects have been exhibited at international meetings such as the San José Foto International Photography Festival in Uruguay, at the Getxophoto International Image Festival in the Basque Country, at the MOOV Film Festival in Belgium and at screenings in Portugal and Amsterdam. In Colombia, at the Museum of Modern Art, at the Planetarium of the City of Medellin, at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota and in different galleries.