Monica Carocci (born in 1966 - lives in Turin) has been one of the first Italian artists - emerged on the scene at the end of the 80's - to apply her energies to photography. Since then, she has exhibited in several shows with painters. This unorthodox company might have influenced her work toward a certain pictorialism and, also, to develop a style which brings to Carocci's work techniques employed by painters. In fact, she treats the photographic paper as if it were a canvas, altering it with chemicals, casual toning, by scratching, adding material and sometimes tearing the paper.

"What I am aiming to do is guide the light by obtaining personal images as my photos are images of my own thoughts. The time spent in the dark room represent the time spent following these images. Often the result is purely casual. I achieve different results to those I started off with: I go ahead by trial and error, also because I continue to see images even after developing the negative."
(M.C. in conversation with G. Romano)

This physical manipulation of her photographs certainly deals with the poetic of Monica Carocci. She plays with perception and point of view, confusing the viewer's sense of reality. She creates a suspension of belief that allows her to abuse and misuse photography in order to question our ready-made perception of the visual world.

Her photographs are a combination of "street photography" and "stage photography." Only rarely does the viewer realize which of the two she's been using. In her early photographs of dolls, for example, Barbies dressed up like whores look like they are able to seduce the viewer, and sometimes it's hard to realize whether they are real models or real "dolls".

In line with the investigations of contemporary photographers (not the school of the Becher from Düsseldorf, but without a doubt photographers such as Barbara Ess and the German Astrid Klein) the work of Monica Carocci is immediately presented as a hypothesis of pure fiction, introducing a genre of photography which refuses to be perceived as a genre, a field of photography situated in an area of indetermination in which real and objective documentation no longer have any meaning. From her early work, these photographs attempt to represent a reality that appears - in itself - incomplete and undefinable.

Photography is changing not only because of techno-improvements - an issue Monica Carocci is not really following up - but because our way of perceiving reality has changed. This is perhaps why, over the last twenty years, a lot of creative photographic production has relied on memory, on dichotomy as presence/absence, on intimacy of a vision moved by new and different subjectivity. It is a place of possibility which attracts contemporary artists: "In photography I'm interested by this effort that you must make to fill the rectangle and isolate all that happens outside that defined space. It is like when a painter takes a canvas and starts to fill it."

Monica Carocci's latest urban landscapes confirm this able combination of formal and psychological. They are photographs that look like cinema sets, pure fiction, Her "dirty" pictures invite us to build an even bigger set than that which the real reference would allow to be imagined. Amid this provoking and ambiguous mix of perceptive and psychological conditions, we cannot distinguish the aesthetic problems of the representation from the emotional dynamics.

Gianni Romano