Eataly Art House – E.ART.H. presents, in collaboration with Fondazione Deloitte and Deloitte Italia, a new exhibition project: And They Laughed At Me, by the Iranian artist and photojournalist Newsha Tavakolian (Tehran, 1981), member of the agency Magnum Photos. The exhibition, curated by Denis Curti, is open to the public free of charge from Wednesday 10 April to Saturday 31 August 2024, at the spaces of the Art House.
And They Laughed At Me is the winning project of the “Reports” section of the first edition of the Deloitte Photo Grant, the new international photography competition promoted by Deloitte Italia with the sponsorship of Fondazione Deloitte and in collaboration with 24 ORE Cultura, the artistic direction of Denis Curti and the BlackCamera team. The works of Newsha Tavakolian arrive in Verona with a renewed exhibition and a selection designed especially for the public of Eataly Art House, following a first presentation at Mudec Photo (13 December 2023 – 28 January 2024) and the participation of the artist at the Biennale della Fotografia Femminile di Mantova (8 March – 14 April 2024).
The project And They Laughed At Me gathers more than 70 archive photographs, unpublished shots and frames. The selected images are characterized by an error: they are negatives that the artist has recovered in his studio recounting the first years of activity, discarded because imperfect, and he chose to accompany photographs where the mistake belongs to others, as the lab printer or the camera itself.
Images full of humanity, marked by the accidentality of daily doing, in which typical elements of reportage alternate with conceptual compositions, where multiple visions are combined or photographs are manipulated with interventions or formal incursions.
Newsha Tavakolian started shooting at a very young age, around 16 years she already collaborated with the Iranian press, then establishing herself as a photojournalist for international newspapers such as The Times, The New York Time or Le Figaro, and reporting in different parts of the world. His signature is particularly well known for the great attention he has devoted to women’s stories and for having founded in 2011 the female photography collective Rawija.