A Matter of Light: Nine Photographers in the Vatican Museums

Setting the birth of a new collection is indeed one of the best ways for a museum to demonstrate its vitality. An ambitious enterprise especially for the "Museum of Museums", namely the Museums of the Pope, which over the centuries of their history have repeatedly been faced with expansions and additions of new collections.

A Matter of Light is a project aimed to create the first collection of contemporary photography in the Vatican Museums. A need turned into an opportunity for experimentation: to transform a historical, social, multicultural, "ritual" or fully symbolic place such as the Vatican Museums, into the object of the creative and interpretative work by nine international photographers, diverse from the perspectives of research, education, style and origin.

Bill Armstrong, Peter Bialobrzeski, Antonio Biasiucci, Alain Fleischer, Francesco Jodice, Mimmo Jodice, Rinko Kawauchi, Martin Parr, Massimo Siragusa joined the project creating unprecedented series for the Vatican Museums. For the fi rst time a museum has realized such an ensemble: a sort of reportage commissioned to a group of "voices" of the international photographic art scene. It opens the doors of the Vatican Museums to the world and shows them in their prestigious and precious, classical and contemporary uniqueness.

Micol Forti, contemporary art scholar, has supervised the Contemporary Art Collection of the Vatican Museums since 2000. She taught Artistic Literature and Museology at the University of Rome "La Sapienza," dealing with several aspects of art and critical thinking of the twentieth century.

Alessandra Mauro, artistic director of the Fondazione Forma for the Photography in Milan and editor-in-chief at the publishing house Contrasto, teaches photography at the DAMS in Roma Tre and at LUISS in Rome.