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"I'm showing how big the sky is" is a tribute by Martina Bacigalupo to her former nanny Chiou Taur Wu, a Taiwanese woman who lived for more than three decades in Italy. Battered by life - from a childhood spent in the fields of the south of the country to working in a factory in Taipei, while still a teenager, to the gambling debts of her Italian husband which forced her to work day and night - Chiou Taur don't let yourself be defeated. Returning to Taiwan at almost 70 years old, she decides to take her revenge on life and do everything she was unable to do before: she resumes her studies, enrolls in ballroom dance classes , and begins to travel. Through hundreds of photos received from Chiou during ten years of correspondence, the Italian photographer offers us the story of extraordinary resilience. Told in the first person, with images and words by Chiou, this book, published by L'Artiere Editions, is a song of freedom, full of humor and poetry. Martina Bacigalupo, born in Genoa in 1978, studied literature and photography before moving to Burundi, East Africa, where she worked for ten years as a freelance documentary photographer. Her work, focused on women rights and migration, investigates the visual dynamics between Africa and the West and has been featured in many leading publications, including The New York Times, Le Monde and The Sunday Times Magazine. Her photographs are part of several collections and museums, among which the Artur Walther Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She is the author of the photo book "Gulu Real Art Studio", published by Steidl in 2013. Martina currently works as a photographer and photo editor in Paris.

"When I was 17, my older sister Susan let me photograph her. I was amazed at how her newly prominent veins and capillaries defined her pregnant body as they raced down her arms and across her abdomen and breasts. I felt I could almost see the growing child through her pale skin. ?Around the turn of the millennium, it was as though I was surrounded by women - colleagues, family, friends - who were expecting, and I felt an urgency to photograph them. Perhaps the urgency I felt had to do with knowing their pregnancy was limited to nine or so months. To photograph a woman before she gives birth, a loved one before they die, the sunlight before it fades and grows dark are all a motivation, and expression of the life force. Inspired by altar paintings from the Italian Renaissance, I used my 7"x17" panoramic camera  for standing portraits. When I realized my subjects sometimes had trouble balancing, I also made horizontals, with the recumbent portraits of Francisco de Goya's Naked Maja, Edouard Manet's Olympia, and André Kertész's Satiric Dancer in mind. I collected copies of paintings, drawings and photographs for inspiration and often asked my subjects to interpret for themselves their gestures or their contrapposto stances. During the time we spent together, we worked collaboratively and slowly-moving and rearranging furniture and props-to create an intimate studio, be it inside their homes or, sometimes, out in the landscape.  Sometimes partners, dogs or cats would join us. The oldest known depiction of pregnancy is the Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 BC), discovered in Austria in 1908. It's a limestone figurine with pendulous breasts and fertile hips. One night in the summer of 2023 when I was developing the last negatives for this project the temperature in my darkroom reached 100 degrees. Overwhelmed by the heat and the intensity of these images, I left the negatives in a water holding bath overnight. When I went to hang them up the next morning I was horrified when the emulsion began sliding down the plastic base of the film. I hurriedly held up one of the sheets of film to the light box and took a photograph. Suddenly, there was a Venus of Willendorf of my own. ?Now, I see the shape or spirit of Venus in each one of these portraits, images of seen and unseen transformations that give rise to human life. I also see my own inspiration to understand and describe the pregnant form - fertility, fecundity, hope, birth, precarity and even time itself."Lois Conner

The book presents a selection of the photographic work made in Naples by Anders Petersen, Swedish master of photography, during Spot home gallery's first artist residency in the year 2022. Throughout his long career, Petersen has photographed in cities across almost every continent, from Tokyo to London, from Valparaiso to Stockholm, driven by an inexhaustible curiosity and a profound interest for the other. For him, photography serves as a means to explore the complexity of the human experience, to capture with sensitivity and honesty the emotions that define and unite us as living beings, part of the one, big, same family. Naples, a "city-world" of many thousand facets, with its chaos and its diverse humanity, was the ideal place for a photographer like him: it is precisely in chaos that life unfolds with all its unpredictability, vibrancy, and beauty. They had never met before, but when it happened, it was love at first sight. Anders was struck by the city's energy and enthusiastically accepted the not-so-easy challenge of photographing it. Naples revealed herself without filters, without fear of showing its wounds and vulnerabilities, open to the empathetic approach of a photographer who can look beyond the surface of things, who can find beauty in the ordinary, and embrace its imperfections.