"La Lunga Strada - Reloaded" by Monika Barth Text by Wolfgang Zurborn
The photographs of the series “La Lunga Strada – Reloaded” by Monika Barth take the viewer on a journey into soul states between faith, love, hope and death. The concrete locations of her photographs in Italy, Ukraine, Norway and Costa Rica merge in the flow of images to form an existential space filled with religious, cultural and political contexts.
In their sequencing, however, the photographs do not fit together to form a linear story, a clear message. The often surreal-looking concatenations of motifs and the paradox of the relationships between the different image levels rather give the protagonists of this very own theatre of real life the freedom to embody a vital spectrum of emotions. It is the precise eye for the special moment, the archaic in the everyday, the expressive expression, the magical idealization, with which the photographer lends her portraits, street scenes, nature shots, still lifes and architectural details a narrative power beyond all anecdotes. With her photographic diary of journeys between 2018 and 2020, she creates a radically subjective document of our contemporary globalized world, in which she abandons any objectifying distance. She is driven by a great empathy for people and it is her special ability to create a closeness in the foreign.
The virtuoso balancing act between document and invention, between realism and magic is what makes the book "La Lunga Strada - Reloaded" so special.
