Domingo Milella’s epic contemporary landscapes reflect an age-old concern – of how man and landscape coexist. For the past ten years, the 31-year-old Italian photographer and Wallpaper* contributor has been charting man’s imprint on earth, directing his camera lens at his chosen subjects – caves, tombs, ancient sites and hieroglyphs, cities, homes and cemeteries - and capturing the points at which architecture and civilisation meet nature, to breath-taking effect.
The New York-and-Bari based photographer has worked with the likes of Massimo Vitali, and counts Thomas Struth as an influential mentor. At the heart of the Milella’s first solo UK show at London’s Brancolini Grimaldi is a compendium of 30 of the photographer’s key works from the last decade, together with a new body of work taken this year at various ancient sites in the Mediterranean.
The works on show are evocative, to say the least; they are a narrative of Milella’s preoccupation with showing the borders between manufactured landscape and natural space. There is a haunting photograph of the vast tombs that make up the remnants of the ancient Turkish city of Myra, while in another image an abandoned Greco-Roman theatre in the ancient city of Termessos seems to be almost painted into the surrounding Taurus mountains.
Milella’s starting point may be an antediluvian world filled with hieroglyphs and caves, but his question - about how our present-day memories are meant to be built in a digital age where much of communication is now transitory - is a very 21st century one indeed.
