CLOROFILLA

The Clorofilla project received second place in the Fine Art / Other category at the International Photography Awards 2025 (IPA).

This year’s competition saw nearly 14,000 entries from 100 countries, reviewed by a distinguished panel of internationally renowned photography experts.

In the July/August issue of Tutti Fotografi, you’ll find an article I wrote in which I share the methods and technical choices behind infrared photography, a key aspect of the work I’ve been developing through Clorofilla.

The final part of the piece also includes a section dedicated to the project, with images of selected works.

Available in both PRINT and DIGITAL formats, at newsstands and online at www.fotografia.it

Clorofilla is an artistic research using infrared photography to investigate landscape as a perceptual construction. By recording a portion of the spectrum invisible to the human eye, the images introduce a gap between direct experience and representation, turning real places into ambiguous spaces suspended between document and interpretation.

The work stems from an interest in how technology alters our perception of the real, and challenges the notion of photography as a neutral record of the world. Infrared is not used as a merely aesthetic device, but as a critical tool — one that makes visible the process by which every image selects, transforms, and interprets what we see.

Natural elements retain a recognizable dimension, yet are traversed by a tension that shifts how they are read: familiar surfaces reveal an unfamiliar structure, light behaves in unexpected ways, and the landscape ceases to be simply a subject to be depicted, it becomes the site where the very mechanism of vision is made apparent.

At a time when synthetic images and digital simulations multiply the ambiguities of representation, Clorofilla works on something different: to show that even the most seemingly direct photograph already contains a transformation of the visible.

“Dave Tavanti succumbs to the overpowering influence of cinema,
his frames distorted by the unseen
and enchanted in their pursuit,
driven by the desire to narrate and capture it,
to transcend the limits of his senses,
with the childlike joy
of infusing mystery into a simple and familiar place.

But Predator is lost in the woods,
moving slowly, almost timidly, as if afraid to crush the leaves.
It forgets to hunt
and is spellbound by the mysterious patterns of trees,
the gentle rustles, the lace-like branches.
Messages of peace and joy reach it,
the simple joy of existence
in the eternal cycle of life,
the law of necessity
that can be both beautiful and whimsical,
obvious and incomprehensible.

Images flow before our eyes,
of us turned into extraterrestrials
witnessing things never seen in our familiar forest,
traversed so many times, walking distractedly.
Its light now astonishes us and tells stories without words,
crafted only of emotions.

And the solitary tree, so perfect and symmetrical,
becomes a symbol of beauty,
layfully entering our minds,
their structure hungry for rationality,
with the smile that Leonardo
painted on the face of the Mona Lisa,
encapsulating the same mystery.“

Rita Castigli