Una diversa bellezza

In over two hundred images, A different beauty gathers the work that Emiliano Mancuso, documentary photographer and film director, realized in his short, intense life brutally ended in 2018 when he was only 47 years old. Italy is the absolute protagonist of the book. The Italy of unease, of difficult suburbs, of small and large stories that Mancuso had told day after day. His photographic lenses privileged daily reality watched with the distance of the informed journalist and the glance of the participant observer trying to understand the urgent socio-economic problems of the Peninsula. From new poverty to hydrogeological instability, Mancuso has created images – as the writer Domenico Starnone says in one of the texts in the volume – in which theme, style, responsibility of the gaze searches a new balance and a different beauty. The book is divided in three sections, following the main projects Mancuso has worked on: Terre di Sud, State of Italy, Felix\’s diary. Terre di Sud is a story about Southern Italy, conducted with a street photography style and in which the protagonists are random encounters, spontaneous shots, daily reality, people on the street. The State of Italy documents the 2008 economic crisis experienced by laborers in Rosarno or in the suburbs of large cities or among those who seek asylum who land in Lampedusa. Casa Felix is ​​instead dedicated to a reportage work on a family home on the eastern outskirts of Rome and which later became a documentary film. A project by Zona, curated by Renata Ferri, A different beauty also presents texts by Mancuso, Ferri and comments by Lucia Annunziata, Giovanna Calvenzi and Domenico Starnone.