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"With this series of black and white panoramic photos taken in the Piedmont region, Josef KOUDELKA continues to explore the evolution of landscape. From the shores of Lake Maggiore to the mountain passes of the Alps, from farm valleys to the construction sites of Turin, from cement works to the vestiges of the past, the human element is only visible in these pictures via the brutal traces left by man where he has transformed nature.
"Today, Piedmont is a wonderful, wounded land. Here are its wonders and its wounds […] Joseph KOUDELKA does for the earth what August SANDER did for his People of the Twentieth Century. If you look closely, his landscapes are portraits. (...) If humans are largely absent from his pictures, it is because the main protagonist is the land itself. In some of his images, the construction sites appear as if they had been abandoned after some catastrophic event such as the one inferred by Cormac McCarthy in his masterpiece The Road. It is almost as if Josef KODELKA, through his camera lens, had already seen nature slowly beginning to heal its wounds by reclaiming what humans have taken away from it." (© Giuseppe Culicchia)