Visual Notes

Attilio Lauria sent this email about the ActionAid Calendar that featured 12 among the 100 finalist photos of the i.Phoneography contest.

Dear Authors,

I’m very happy to inform you that the sale of the “i.Phoneography for Local Groups of ActionAid” calendars went better than we had hoped, allowing a net inflow of € 3,222.20.

[…] Local Groups decided to allocate these funds to the “South-Africa Project”

In this way, a large part of the Support Center, with its small garden and his small farm, will have your signature together with that of Italian Local Groups, and the memory of a lovely calendar.

I hope you will be proud of this as all of us.

Thanks again to all of you and all the best

Attilio

12 among the 100 finalist photos of the i.Phoneography contest have been selected to produce the 2011 ActionAid calendar. “Yellow knot” got the month of August. The calendar will be printed in 1150 copies and distributed all over Italy.

Remember what happened with eyephoneography #1 ? Max Oliva, the director of the Hub Madrid, the 21st of last September decided to take down the show without giving any notice to the organizer. The person who physically took down the show did it with no respect whatsoever for the images and ruined them all. 48 images from me, Greg Schmigel, MissPixels, and Sion Fullana treated like trash. It was called a barbaric act, a raptus of madness, a vandalic act. Well, not at all!

Today, it finally hit me: the Hub being a place for creative people, it was an experiment of creative stupidity! As a matter of fact, the ultimate goal of this act was to actually support mobile photography. How, you’d ask?

Well, yesterday the organizer of eyephoneography and this “genius” who directs the Hub, signed an agreement in which he recognized that he gave the order of taking down the show and agreed to pay the sum of 2500 Euros to reimburse the damages he caused. This sum was shared by the organizer with the four of us as if the photos were actually sold. Result? I realized that I have sold 22 photos 12 of which had been basically “bought” by Max Oliva!

How can an individual support more mobile photography if he buys all the photos exposed in an exhibition? Yes, you’re right, he could have bought the photos without taking them down and destroying them. But it wouldn’t be creative stupidity, would it?