Last Issue

How strong can we drive? How far can we go? And how fast? How far is it permitted to
dare and what boundaries we cannot overstep? How much can we rev up the engine,
forcing the limits of our bodies, our desires, our ambitions?
RVM#7 – How hard can we push? is our journey to the limit, our investigation of the
break points, our vision from the runaway train.
How hard can we push? is the question behind our cover, a shot from the Carnaval
series by the Brazilian collective Cia de Foto, whose work can be accessed through the
magazine’s website http://www.rearviewmirror.it. How hard can we push? is the question we
ask ourselves and photographers we published on RVM # 7. Daniela Edburg, with her
Drop Dead Gorgeous series, offers a look at today’s society with all its self-centered
search for satisfaction; Laura El-Tantawy, with I’ll Die For You, focused on the peculiar
bond between man and land in India. Yet the bonds can also fade away, as Zhang Xiao
tells with Coastline, depicting the loss of a sense of belonging in today China. On the
other hand, Gihan Tubbeh explores the most primitive and instinctive conditions of
humankind, with her series Nights of Grace. Toni Greaves, in Furries, makes us cross
the threshold of a Kafkaesque world where men become animals to find their own
identity; whereas Isabelle Pateer questions, with her series Unsettled, the global
phenomenon of industrial expansion and the way it manifests itself to the people and
their surroundings.
To entertain a dialogue with the pictures, we chose six stories written for us by as many
young writers – Claudia Colucci, Francesca Silvestre, Marco Amerighi, Giuseppe Franco,
Leonardo Staglianò and Fabrizio Allione – who graduated from the Holden School, an
institute of higher learning in Writing that supported us for RVM#7, affording a valuable
contribution to our research on the different forms of storytelling.
The scenario changes with In Perspective, where Anna Luccarini, guest curator for
RVM#7, lead us in Mexico to discover the work of Francisco Mata Rosas, able to mix
creatively contemporary art and tradition.
Then, to investigate the new resources and the new languages enabling to document
the world, we entrusted our iRVM section to Samuele Pellecchia, a documentary
photographer who became “obsessed” with taking pictures with his iPhone
(compulsivephotographer.tumblr.com).
At last, with Picture in a Frame, we choose a diptych from Olya Ivanova’s series Non-
Conform to close RVM#7 photographic journey.
Among the columns, Archivio Segreto, an immersion into the archive of a master of
photography, tells the story of Richard Kalvar. With InterView our guest critic Fabio
Severo meets Richard Mosse just after the publication of his new book Infra. PhotoBiz
dialogues with Saltimages co-founder Anna Zekria. LimeLight, venturing into the
territory of dynamic photography, interviews Luca Bigazzi, Paolo Sorrentino’s This must
be the place director of photography.
Finally, RVM Brand New Talent, a contest dedicated to photographers who publish their
work for the first time. Selected by a jury composed by RVM staffers, Arianna Rinaldo
(Ojo de Pez Editor in chief), Michele Smargiassi, (journalist at La Repubblica) and
Riccardo Venturi (photographer at Contrasto Agency), Pamela Piscicelli made her
publishing debut, with the project Invaders, on RVM #7.
Aiming to deal with a wider, international horizon, starting from this issue RVM will
publish all the texts in English (with the Italian translation at the end of the magazine). As
a caesura between the two languages, we chose a second cover, L’Altra Cover, a shot
from Natalie Naccache project Very Young.
RVM#7, December – March 2012
16×24, eng/ita, 132 pp., 12 euros, Postcart Editions