Fièvre is the eleventh book published by Lorenzo Castore. Fièvre takes shape from the desire of David Fourré – founder of Editions Lamaindonne – and Caroline Benichou to share Castore’s approach to photography, which manifests itself in a very physical daily practice. “The fever goes in every direction. – Castore writes in his interview with Benichou in the volume – It arises from the emotional involvement in my personal experience which is many things together… abandonment to sensual desire, need for intellectual and spiritual growth, attempt at a relationship with the other here and now and a tension towards the stars and infinite space. (..)”

Lack & Longing is the second chapter of Time-Maze, a photographic book made of indipendent volumes published in a progressive chronology arbitrarily defined by life.

Discover the world of Franchina, Cioccolatina, Lulù, Ramona, Brigida, Ornella, Monica the Viking, Fiorella, Rosa, Ambra and Graziella – Sicilian transvestites living/working in Catania’s neighbourhood San Berillo, that has always been the red-light district.

“This story is not only poetic. It’s also a story of suffering for a rejected identity. Often it is also a story of misery. There’s the need to sell oneself as the only possibility for existing. There’s the impossibility of, or the incapacity for, creating around yourself some steady relationships and a normal life in the simplest sense of the word. There exists a sense of guilt that fights with the desire for redemption. The context is a land where the catholic tradition lives in close contact with the criminal one, and where religion, devotion, sin, sexuality and violence are weaved together by a magical force that synthesises them all. But theirs is also an extreme choice of liberty and of affirmation of their own beings, with all the risks and the limits that this brings in a falsely open society like ours.” L.C.

“The passage of time shapes a new alphabet, a new language, and stimulates a revelation: memory emerges, my experience melts with something I feel is universal. I have decided to work on a life book made of volumes. The brilliant book-designer Eloi Gimeno created the size and graphic shape of the series of volumes starting from the covers which are structured on the concept of time conceived as a line that is not straight but takes the form of a maze. The graphic design is all conceived in black and white.”

“I have edited the photographic sequence of the first volume 1994-2001 | A BEGINNING and I’ll do the same on the following ones. There is no rule in terms of length of time: each period (each volume) will be marked by circumstances. The idea of this collection of volumes is not that of a diary but a literary autobiography. Soon I will edit the second volume 2001-2007, then the third one 2007-2012, then on and on…” L.C.

Land is a story about the place and people belonging to it. A personal reflection on the place where the traditions of different cultures mix with one another, the place that witnessed to events that erupted with the World War II, the place which industrial prosperity is already over, where the past gives way to the present.

For the first time, Lorenzo Castore came to Gliwice in the late 1990s, looking for a new way to express his emotions. Enchanted by the people he met on his way, he returned to this side in nearly 20 years. The book is a summary of his wanderings, it is a photographic diary of travel that exceeds the frame of time. In his story, Lorenzo focuses on people. Although they remain unnamed for us, we feel special sympathy for them, this kind of closeness that is possible only when it is honest. And this is exactly what Castore’s photography is like: balanced, focused, respectful and open to other people. And this is exactly what this book is like.

Between 2007 and 2013, the photographer lived in Poland. One day, he bumps into a wild woman in the street, but she won’t have a single word with him. When he is finally able to track her, he discovers the life conditions of Ewa and her brother Piotr, in a run-down apartment of Krakow. Left alone by themselves, alcoholics, living without gas, electricity or hot water, Ewa and Piotr reveal bits by bits parts of their lives, and little by little end up accepting the camera. Castore mixes his own images with souvenir photographs, family photos that were entrusted to him by the brother and sister. Lorenzo Castore’s approach is moving towards misery and the suffering humanity, towards places of bereavement, of hardships and rejection. He is going to places noone wants to visit. And he brings back wonders… Through his work, where horror and beauty are so intimate, Castore encourages us to look at the other without any prejudice, without blinders or fear.

Ultimo domicilio was born in 2008 when, during a trip to Sarajevo and Mostar, Castore photographed interiors of houses abandoned during the war, suddenly left with all the personal objects that belonged to their inhabitants.

Over the years, the work develops into a solid, entirely personal structure. In this work the houses of war in Sarajevo and Mostar meet  the house of history (Finale Ligure), the house of youth and poetry (Casarola), the house of the search for a father figure (Brooklyn), the maternal house (Fontenay Mauvoisin) and the house of a new beginning (Krakow, Castore’s house).

Anyone who has been to Cuba will have been struck by the physical presence of colour in this jewel of the Caribbean; by the luxuriance of the sunsets and by the way that, at different hours of the day, the light intensifies the colours. For Lorenzo Castore, in his dynamic photographs of Cuba and Mexico, colour is everything. He uses it in extraordinary ways, conveying a rich sense of place and atmosphere. The subjects he chooses are everyday situations – the bars, the cafes, the streets – and the resulting images are revealing and powerful.

“Nero” is the result of a project on memory carried out between May and October 2003 in Sulcis, a region in south-western Sardinia which, starting in the 1930s, underwent a major development with the founding of the town of Carbonia.
This work, realised between May and October 2003, is an interpretation of memory, imagination, and also a restitution, as if it were the fruit of time passing by and rising again.
The book is accompanied by five texts by Sardinian authors: Marcello Fois, Giorgio Todde, Flavio Soriga, Luciano Marroccu and Giulio Angioni.