Info

@assile_m

 
On personal long-term projects;

@__softmeat__

On commissioned work for clients and cultural organizations;

@casa_studio_casa_studio

The regeneration of my grandparents' house in the old quarter of Marina di Ragusa, soon to become a studio, guest house, and cultural space open to collaborations and gatherings.

Bio

 

Melissa Carnemolla (Ragusa, b. 1991) is a documentary photographer whose work moves constantly along the border between affection and inquiry. Her method never begins with a journalistic hypothesis, but with a personal bond - a film set in Rome, a return to her Sicilian roots, an instinctive affinity with a small Dutch town - which, over time and through prolonged presence on the ground, grows into a relationship of trust with the people she photographs. It is within that space of intimacy that Carnemolla's photography begins to sense what it cannot yet name: a visual unease that precedes rational understanding.

This approach runs through three key bodies of work: Behind the Dream, born from her extended stay in a peripheral neighborhood of Rome following the filming of Michele Vannucci's movie; The Island Within The Island, a visual and human investigation into the agro-industrial system of her native Ragusa, built through her bond with a family of farm laborers; and What dams kept safe, made during her studies in the Netherlands, in which the late discovery of a story of abuse concealed by a coastal community retroactively redefines the meaning of every image taken before she knew it.

What links these projects is not their subject matter — which shifts radically from one work to the next - but a consistent ethical commitment: to photograph not the sensational fact, but the ordinary life that surrounds it, absorbs it, silences it, or survives it. Carnemolla works within the uncomfortable space where the welcome she receives as an author coexists with the responsibility of telling what that welcome, at times, helps to conceal.

Stay in touch : carnemollamelissa@gmail.com

IG: @assile_m - @__softmeat__ - @casa_studio_casa_studio