EXHIBITION

PHI Event Centre UPCLOSE Fabrizio Maltese COVE Rv2 — Photo: *Up Close* / © Fabrizio Maltese

November 2 → November 30, 2022 Up Close

Exhibition
Free
Photography

PHI Centre Espace Rhino + Espace Plateau
315 Saint-Paul St West
Montreal, Quebec, H2Y 2A3

Monday and Tuesday: 9 am to 5 pm
Wednesday and Thursday: 9 am to 7 pm
Friday: 9 am to 8 pm
Saturday: 10 am to 8 pm
Sunday: 11 am to 7 pm

Admission is free, no reservation required

Before visiting, please review some essential information about the visit, including details on accessibility at the Centre.

To plan a school, community or corporate visit, go to our Group Visits page.

For more details on safety measures in place at the PHI Centre, visit our COVID-19 page.

A photo exhibition by Fabrizio Maltese.

Presented by

CINEMANIA

For the first time in Canada, the CINEMANIA film festival and the PHI Centre present a comprehensive overview of Fabrizio Maltese's work as a portrait photographer and documentary filmmaker.

Fabrizio has imagined for each location a different experience that will allow visitors to discover his craft as a photographer, which is totally connected and inseparable from that of a filmmaker.

Discover Up Close, a world premiere photo exhibition featuring 20 works. With this series, Fabrizio travels the reverse path of the photographic process of his celebrity portraits, starting from a photo that has already been taken over time and consequently hypermediatized in order to re-appropriate it and make it become, through a manual and analogue process, a unique object.

Up Close, the concept

PHI Event Centre Up Close Fabrizio Maltese IMG1 — Photo: *Up Close* / © Fabrizio Maltese

In today's world, we are surrounded by images. The evolution of technology has made access to photography more democratic and, thanks to electronic media, photos are more omnipresent than ever.

The desire for images has grown exponentially, which has driven both the production and the consumption of photos to unprecedented heights.

Social networks have made it possible to share photos at the speed of light and without limits. Celebrities (and their reputations) are never safe, since smartphones and selfie sticks are everywhere.

As a result, they may struggle to control their image, just as professional photographers struggle to control and protect the dissemination and reproduction of their content.

The exhibition Up Close stems from a reflection on these themes and times. It seeks to comment on the hyper-distribution, hypermediatization and hyper-consumption of images around us.

PHI Event Centre Up Close Fabrizio Maltese IMG2 — Photo: *Up Close* / © Fabrizio Maltese

The exhibition also comments about the control that photographers have—or don’t have—over their own work once their images have entered into the digestive tract of mass consumption, and it explores the meaning of the image of a movie star outside of a cinematic context.

Up Close takes these choices further not only in the moment the picture is taken, when it is decided which elements to highlight or eliminate from reality, but also by altering these elements after the picture is taken. By playing with an existing image and then transforming it.

The author thereby takes back the ownership of one of their own images, which has been made public by the media, and has a chance to reinterpret it in a unique way and to limit its distribution in a very controlled fashion.

Up Close is a series of images, 56x76 cm, cyanotype tinted with green tea Yerba mate on fine art paper, creating unique pieces.

About Fabrizio Maltese

PHI Event Centre Fabrizio Maltese Up Close Fabrizio — Photo: Fabrizio Maltese / © Kris Dewitte

Italian-born, Luxembourg-based Fabrizio Maltese is a documentary filmmaker and an award winning photographer.

His celebrity portraits have graced the covers of magazines including The Hollywood Reporter, GQ, Sight & Sound, Rolling Stone, Studio Ciné Live and many others.

His distinctive portraits have been showcased in numerous solo exhibitions around the world, including a recent retrospective on his work as photographer and filmmaker organized earlier this year by the Cinémathèque in Macau.

As a stills photographer, he has worked on some twenty European arthouse films.

As a director, cinematographer and producer, he made five documentary features to date: Twenty-Five Palms (2015), 50 Days in the Desert (2016), California Dreaming (2019), I fiori persi (Lost Flowers)(2021), L’invitation (The Invitation) (2022).