Sara. Corpo e Mondo is the title of Dario Salamone’s new book, a photographic series taken in Spring 2019 and portraying a young woman offering her fully naked body to the gaze of the camera, on a deserted beach.

 

The title is a nod to the protagonist, Sara, as much as a reference to the project’s subject of investigation, namely the importance of the body, and its centrality in the shaping of human experiences.

 

Across the book’s images, taken in just a few hours over a non-stop session, Sara opens to an effortless dialogue with the photographer. Intense and yet delicate, they become part of a continual aesthetic exploration, as much as a place for reflection upon the very concept of bodihood, its biological relevance, and its social and cultural implications.

 

As a way of expanding these fundamental themes, Salamone invited some guests to join the project and contribute to the book.

 

Critic Riccardo Conti and philosopher Emanuele Coccia added new layers of interpretation to the series, engaging in a dense conversation around the role of nudity in the theories of the “gaze”, and tracing back its relevance across the history of image production, starting from the photographer’s choice to deconstruct the representation of femininity in western iconography.

 

Artists Valentina Cameranesi and Flaminia Veronesi “gifted” the photographer with two of their most emblematic representations of femininity (respectively Orca, a glass and ceramic sculpture reinterpreted by Salamone in the form of a 47 x 32 cm poster, and Tette Fotoniche XXL, lensed and printed on the book’s endpaper).