Glue

“The idea for Glue came about when the photographer discovered an old factory register. Inside, the unknown owner had stuck pictures from newspapers, magazines, greetings cards, labels, etc. all meticulously cut out and in chronological order, from the 1950s to the 1970s. From this strange repertory Chiara Rame extracts clues and traces of a distant past, just visible through the successive stages of photography and printing, but heavy with resonance. In the study of time through these images one observes something of the mysterious memory of photography. The multiplicity of successive choices which have filtered these images just until now – photographing, developing, paste-up, printing, cutting out, selective re-photographing – have in some way distilled an essence of sensations which have permitted them to last, to densify and to be imbued by all the attention that has been accorded to them. These photographs have ‘meaning': they are the sum of a troubled or emotional scrutiny that they themselves have generated. In them resides something of our strange and inexplicable need for images. Christian Maccotta, artistic director of Les Boutographies Rencontres Photographiques de Montpellier”