The Reading Warehouse

This first published monograph by Domingo Milella is a photographic journey from his hometown in the outskirts of Bari in southern Italy, taking us to Mexico City, Cairo, Ankara, Anatolia, Sicily, Tunisia and as far as Mesopotamia. Milella's subject is cities and their borders, cemeteries and villages, caves and homes, tombs and hieroglyphs--in short, signs of man's presence on earth. His interest is the overlap between civilization and nature, and how landscape and architecture are invested with individual and collective memory. These photographs emerge from and challenge classical ideas of landscape in art history, and seek an alternative iconography in which an almost forgotten past coexists with the present. Says Milella: "Making images doesn't only mean documenting or taking photographs. It's also a possibility for contemplation and recollection. Building an image of the past is to face the present, and activate the possibility of the future."