Photo-Gallery, Monte Cassino 5 Street, 70-415 Szczecin

Jean-Marc Caracci - Homo Urbanus Europeanus

23.10.2009 - 20.12.2009

Jean-Marc Caracci

Of Sicilian heritage, Jean-Marc Caracci [self-taught photographer] was born in Tunisia in 1958. He has lived in the south of France, Montpellier, since he was one year old.

His main object of photographic research has always been the Man, the urban part of the human being... let's say the "urban being". Inspired in it by photographers like Henri Cartier Bresson, Elliott Erwitt or Raymond Depardon... and by the style of the american painter, Edward Hopper.

On its form, the "Homo Urbanus Europeanus" project mainly presents lonely characters, human beings shooted in urban back ground. It doesn't mean that he wants to show the loneliness in the city... or at least not the negative and sad part of loneliness. His images express the happiness to stay in the city and to enjoy it. Lonely urban people, photographed by Caracci, look like kings of the street, walking with proudness in the city that seems to belong to them. Shooted alone, isolated out of the crowd, these people, these characters, don't know they are playing a role without their knowledge, directed into their natural set.

As Caracci likes to say, regarding the "Homo Urbanus Europeanus" project : "I am working for Europe". On a philosophic level, the project clearly takes indeed a politic option. Having Europe as a frame, and mainly its capitals, the idea is to gather all European countries by the photography... whether they already belong to a European Union or not yet. The images of the project, whether made in Warsaw, Tallinn or Paris, are characterized by their "europeanity". National and cultural particularities are excluded, as much as possible, from its sphere of activity. So, looking at the images of the project, nobody can recognize any country or city [except their inhabitants themselves]... but everybody is able to recognize Europe on all of them.

The "Homo Urbanus Europeanus" project started in Bratislava, in June 2007. Then followed Riga, Vilnius, Sofia, Madrid, Warsaw, Rome, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Helsinki, Tallinn, Reykjavik, Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Stockholm, Prague, Berlin, Istanbul, Lisbon, Bucharest, Tirana, Budapest and Vienna. So, 25 european capitals and metropoles have been visited already in the frame of the project... more should come.

Jean-Marc Caracci - Homo Urbanus Europeanus