Description
These images can be read as a hymn to democracy. There is no greater hero than the nameless worker, the faceless pensioner, the anonymous housewife whose ambitions rarely spill beyond survival. No grandstanding, no triumphalism, nothing important, nothing resembling grandeur – only the anti-hero going about unheroic errands. Ages of convoluted innocence. The more everyday, the more genuinely epic and the more real.
Daria Troitskaia recoils from the facile, the obvious, the shallow lures of the pretty, the bait of the emotive, to hunt instead for a raw Malta, an actual Malta. She has nothing to learn on the technical level – her images prevail faultless, her cropping impeccable.
If I try to identify a one-word common denominator that runs through the images of this book, I would opt for ‘truth’. Unvarnished, crude, piercing truth. Rarely unkind, but mostly unforgiving.
Giovanni Bonello
