Francesco Neri’s Farmers gathers portraits made in the northern Italian countryside where he grew up, a body of work that in 2018 received the first August Sander Prize for Portrait Photography from the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne. Neri photographs men, women, and children of family-run farms, working within the analogue tradition of Italian photography; he studied with Guido Guidi in Ravenna. What distinguishes the pictures is their scale: he prints them as contacts from 8×10 inch colour and black-and-white negatives, so the photographs stay unexpectedly small, small enough to appear at full size in this book rather than enlarged toward monumentality.
That decision shapes how the portraits read. Light, background, posture, and the body language of people formed by physical labour carry the images, and the gaze of each sitter matters. Neri’s tone is quiet, and the book sustains that quiet across 62 reproductions, 40 in colour and 22 in tritone, with design by Filippo Nostri of Faenza. Jean-Paul Deridder contributes an accompanying text. The edition is clothbound at 24 × 30.5 cm over 96 pages, with the main text in English and an Italian, French, German, and Flemish leaflet.
The subject is not only individual likeness. Neri works where small-scale, family-driven village agriculture meets an increasingly industrialised and globalised farming economy. His portraits record what persists and ask what comes next. For readers drawn to contemporary portraiture, to the continuing argument over the photographic print and its scale, or to Italian photography’s analogue lineage, Farmers is the second monograph by an artist with more than a decade of long-term photographic projects behind him.
Neri teaches photography at the Institute for Graphic Design in Faenza and is a member of the AA School of Architecture, London. Exhibitions in 2020 at Fondation A Stichting, Brussels, and Hartmann Projects at Galerienhaus Stuttgart gave the work a public context in the year of publication.
