Edicola 518 / Emergenze Publishing

Bellissimo, a tourist user guide is dedicated to glorifying the understated. It looks for style and character in places that are often ignored, exploring the beach of Rome in Ostia in its first issue; a place no one but a Roman would choose to go on holiday. With a distinctively fun and refreshing tone of voice, the brainchild of Paolo Zerbini and Ivan Ruberto takes us on a tour of places that are not commonly known; but unique nonetheless.
Guest art directed by Li von Euler, the London-based photographers embarked on this annual project as a way to explore a specific destination and its inhabitants. The publication immerses the reader into lesser-known communities namely through highly stylised documentary photography, a wholly unself-conscious design, witty articles, not to mention the insight of a local guest expert who offers up their knowledge of the area in great detail.

Of all the firearms in the world owned by private citizens for non-military purposes, half are in the United States of America. In number they exceed the country’s population: 393 million for 328 million people. This is no coincidence, nor a matter of market alone: it is rather a matter of tradition and Constitutional guarantee. It is the history of the Second Amendment, ratified in 1791 to reassure the inhabitants of the newly independent territories that their Federal Government could not, one day, abuse its authority over them. Two hundred and fifty years later, the Second Amendment is still entrenched in all aspects of American life and this book frames its current status through what are seen as four fundamental American values: Family, Freedom, Passion, Style.

Photographer Gabriele Galimberti has travelled to every corner of the United States, from New York City to Honolulu, to meet proud gun-owners, and to see their firearms collections. He has photographed people and guns in their homes and neighbourhoods, including locations where no one would expect to find such collections. These, often unsettling, portraits, along with the accompanying stories of the owners and their firearms which are based on interviews, provide an uncommon and unexpected insight into what today is really represented by the institution of the Second Amendment.

An idea, born a bit by chance, becomes a photographic project, with curious and interesting anthropological implications: a kind of ‘monogamy’ – the one with one’s l car – that some owners carry on for decades, growing old together with the mechanical vehicle, which is thus, little by little, almost assuming a soul.

The search for subjects is done mainly in two ways: the author leaves small messages on every old car he sees around town; he also occasionally stops people driving these veterans. He also tells everyone he knows about the project, asking them to investigate in their families and, in turn, to spread the word among relatives and friends.

Then the meeting takes place, to immortalize the passage of time in this particular symbiosis, actually, between man and car: in the time lapse between ‘yesterday and today,’ in fact, the adventures and memories of an entire existence are interwoven.

Automotive Monogamy – aimed at lovers of photography and the human spirit – collects in these 96 pages and 70 photos the stories of the people behind each car, telling both visually – thanks to his shots collected in Italy, Argentina and the United Kingdom – and through the short texts that accompany them, their singular and often ‘epic’ stories.