Interference landscape brings together two projects that explore historical, technical, and conceptual aspects of the photographic medium.

Francesco Del Conte will present his new work After Carleton Watkins, a series that pays tribute to the great 19th-century American photographer. His images, renowned for their sharpness, composition, and technical ambition, not only contributed to the development of scientific disciplines such as botany and geology, but also profoundly shaped the perception of the American landscape.

Starting from this historical context, the work develops a reflection that does not draws from the direct capture of reality, but from the re-mediation of existing images. The landscape photographs in this series are sourced from digital archives such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, spaces where billions of images are collected and shared on a global scale. The project is thus grounded in the reappropriation of anonymous images, forgotten within the digital universe, positioning itself within a tradition that runs through the history of photography, from collage to contemporary appropriation practices.

This digital material is translated into analog images through an experimental process: the initial phase consists of downloading copyright-free landscape images from the aforementioned platforms, sometimes slightly modified to evoke a nineteenth-century aesthetic. Subsequently, in the darkroom, a 13×18 cm black-and-white negative is placed directly in contact with a computer monitor and exposed to the digital image for a fraction of a second. In a procedure that reverses the logic of digitization, the silver-based emulsion records the digital image, which is then developed and printed using traditional techniques. The result consists of hybrid images, characterized by a rich tonal range but also by a loss of sharpness, caused by the distance between the negative and the pixels.

The landscapes that emerge appear suspended, devoid of a clear temporal placement, with nature as the absolute protagonist. The images evoke historical photographs while simultaneously calling into question their authenticity and dating. The blur softens details and introduces a margin of ambiguity, transforming familiar views into enigmatic scenes in which the representation of nature recalls the tradition of the sublime. By bringing early photography into conversation with anonymous digital images, the series develops a stratified narrative that investigated the evolution of landscape photography.

These works will be presented in dialogue with the series Skyglow,  a long-term project that examines the impact of light pollution on sky observation while also questioning the objective nature of photography, and the possibility of producing reliable visual documents.

To explore this complex issue, the work Skyglow, an English term referring to the brightness of the night sky caused by artificial light sources, places at the center of its investigation astronomical observation and the growing impact of light pollution on today’s society.
Recognized globally as one of the most widespread forms of pollution, artificial light at night increasingly obscures our view of celestial light and profoundly threatens the life cycles and well-being of countless animals, plants, and ecosystems. The fundamental relationship that humanity has developed with the sky throughout its history has also been severely compromised over the past century by increasing urbanization and radical changes in lifestyles.

At the intersection of contemporary art, astronomy, and environmental sciences, Skyglow fits within a line of research that prioritizes method and process over the final image. The project does not merely show the visual effects of light pollution, but also proposes alternative documentary strategies. At its core lies a particularly rigorous method, which involves photographing the same constellations from different locations, each characterized by a different level of light pollution. Crucially, all photographic parameters remain strictly constant in every place during each session: the type of lens and film used, the aperture, the exposure time, and the atmospheric conditions. This approach ensures that the only factor capable of influencing the density of the photographic emulsion is the amount of artificial light recorded by the film. The images are produced with the aid of an equatorial mount, a sophisticated astronomical device that synchronizes the movement of the camera with the Earth’s rotation, thus allowing for long exposures of the night sky even up to one hour.

Within this scientific and controlled system, photography becomes a measuring device rather than an expressive tool in the traditional sense. The images can be observed without a predetermined orientation and present themselves as direct recordings of the interaction between light and a photosensitive surface. The work suspends, or at least reduces, subjective intervention, questioning the role of the author and the interpretative dimension of the image. Skyglow thus offers a critical reflection on the possibility of producing objective visual information, while also probing the limits and potential of photography in representing reality.