Urbanautica

PHOTOGRAPHY AS LIVING ARCHIVE

by Steve Bisson

© Elena Taganova from"Shadows of the Summer Wind"

Since its origins photography played a role in narrating memory and in measuring the distance — or continuity — between what a community once was and what it is becoming. Through the image, traditions appear as traces, at times persistent, at times fragile, suspended between the desire to preserve themselves and the inevitable push of change. The four projects considered here show how photography can be both a tool and a question: a means of investigating the relationship between individuals and cultures, between foundational myths and social transformations, between loss and the reactivation of memory. Elena Taganova turns photography into a temporal return, revealing the fragile tension between a once-cohesive communal past and a present marked by estrangement. Yiming Zhu uses images as a bridge between ancestral practices and future imaginaries, preserving the symbolic and gendered knowledge embedded in the fading world of traditional sericulture. Claudia Corrent transforms photography into a relational ritual, intertwining personal and familial archives to show how memory becomes a shared space where life and death quietly converse. Finally, Marco Waldis employs the camera to examine how collective identities are shaped—and fractured—by enduring frontier myths, exposing the gaps between celebrated narratives and marginalized histories.

© Elena Taganova from "Shadows of the Summer Wind"

In Shadows of the Summer Wind by Elena Taganova, photography becomes a journey through time, a return to a childhood place where the act of remembering confronts the experience of estrangement. The summer village — once a microcosm of relationships and everyday rituals — now appears as an emptied shell, recognizable yet silent, where nature itself reclaims what had been taken from it.

© Elena Taganova from "Shadows of the Summer Wind"

Taganova’s images are not simple documents of environmental or demographic change: they restore the tension between a once-shared communal past and a fragmented present, asking what truly survives of a tradition when the community that sustained it dissolves. In this sense, photography becomes an exercise in reconciliation: the gaze seeks what remains, but also reveals what is irretrievably lost.

© Elena Taganova from "Shadows of the Summer Wind"

The project A Silkworm's Dreams Weave a Rhyme by Yiming Zhu shows how photography can serve as a bridge between cultural memory and future imagination. Through the metaphor of silk — a material that is ritual, economic, and symbolic all at once — Zhu explores a millennia-old heritage on the brink of disappearance: that of traditional Chinese sericulture, a world in which women’s labor, ancestral myths, and rural spirituality formed a complex weave of meaning.

© Yiming Zhu from "A Silkworm's Dreams Weave a Rhyme"

Here, photography does not merely record the decline of an industry: it interrogates what modernity has overshadowed and asks what kinds of identity can still emerge from the dialogue between ancient practices and contemporary worlds. The photographic act becomes an act of care, a way to preserve not only a material heritage but, above all, the invisible dimension of female knowledge, vernacular beliefs, and ways of inhabiting time.

© Yiming Zhu from "A Silkworm's Dreams Weave a Rhyme"

In Quanto rimane della notte by Claudia Corrent, photography becomes an intimate and relational device, capable of crossing the threshold between life and death, between individual memory and familial memory. The work, born from the loss of the artist’s father, intertwines archival photographs, video stills, diary pages, and new images. This temporal stratification recreates an affective circularity in which past and present coexist, confirming the idea that memory is not a line but a space — a space where the living and the dead communicate through signs, lights, and presences.

© Claudia Corrent from "Quanto rimane della notte"

The photographic act becomes a contemporary form of ritual, a way to rebuild a bond, to prevent what once was from fading into oblivion. Here tradition is not a communal belonging, but an emotional inheritance: the silent transmission of gestures, words, and memories that shape the most intimate identity of a person.

With The New Frontier by Marco Waldis, photography once again interrogates a community — that of Forks — historically shaped by the American frontier myth. Tradition here is not a set of family rituals or material cultures, but a political and social imaginary that continues to influence the present: the cult of autonomy, the relationship with the land, the narrative of conquest and resilience.

Waldis observes how this legacy shapes contemporary identities even in a context marked by economic crises, industrial transformations, and tensions with the colonial history of the territory, particularly regarding the realities faced by the Quileute people. Through portraits of individuals, places, and everyday practices, the project shows how photography can make visible the rifts between celebrated memory and suppressed memory, between what a community chooses to tell about itself and what instead remains at the margins.

Across these four works, a common element emerges: photography is increasingly a language that not only preserves but activates the past in order to question it, placing it in dialogue with the present and restoring it as living material. Photographs of abandoned houses, textile rituals, family archives, or remote towns thus become tools for understanding how traditions transform, how communities redefine themselves, and how individuals seek continuity in a changing world.

Photography, in this sense, is not only memory: it is a place of negotiation between what survives and what disappears.

ELENA TAGANOVA
YIMING ZHU
CLAUDIA CORRENT
MARCO WALDIS

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