Between 2005 and 2015, Cesare Fabbri made photographs in and around Emilia-Romagna, the region of his birth, and in Sardinia. The Flying Carpet gathers that decade of work into eighty pages, moving between colour and black-and-white without settling into either. Published by MACK in 2017, it is Fabbri’s first book.

What he photographs is neither quite landscape nor quite still life. A rural hut acquires painted, questioning eyes. A plant hangs uprooted in mid-air. An embroidered carpet lifts on the breeze. The title image gives the collection its governing idea: objects roused from sleep, personified, caught in the moment before they act. These scenes carry an unmistakable comic charge — not jokes, exactly, but the logic of a drawn panel, in which a thing can be both itself and a character.

Fabbri has acknowledged the example of Luigi Ghirri, and the older photographer’s description of the camera as a magical toy able to bring together the great and the small, illusion and reality, adult awareness and the fairy-tale world of childhood is a fair account of what happens here. Fabbri studied photography and urban planning at the IUAV in Venice, and the double training shows: his frames are built with an eye for the built environment and an equal willingness to let it misbehave.

He took part in the 2007 Stuttgart Biennale of Photography and Architecture and was shortlisted for Atlante Italiano 007, organised by MAXXI in Rome; in 2009 he founded the experimental photography platform osservatorio fotografico with Silvia Loddo. For a collector, the interest lies in watching a distinctive sensibility take shape across ten years and two very different Italian terrains, in a first book that MACK has given a considered physical form — flexi-bound, 24 x 29 cm, with a tipped-in image. It belongs to a recognisable lineage of Italian colour photography while remaining entirely its own.