Overview
Lorenzo Vitturi's project Dalston Anatomy examines the environment of East London's Ridley Road Market through a series of portraits and still life photographs. Vibrant and energetic, the distinctive nature of the place is depicted through the faces of local characters, urban setting and debris from the market.
Inhabiting the intersection between the sculptural and the photographic, Vitturi's work is often playful in its informal spanning of mediums. Thinking of himself as 'a visionary anatomist' he imagines the market, its people and produce as a body to be dissected using the camera with his studio as a laboratory. Strange ephemera and objects are reassembled and layered to create alternative totems, a colourful series of new anatomies unique to Vitturi's visionary realm.
The alien forms created in the studio are organic and temporary, carefully compiled structures of found fish heads, hair pieces, giant snails and coconuts coloured by pigments and wrapped in thread. These makeshift sculptures mimic the temporal nature of the market and the objects themselves, existing often only to be photographed or in the process of being disassembled or rotting.
Dalston Anatomy is a unique portrayal of a soon to be extinct way of life. As a local resident of the area around Ridley Road Market, Vitturi felt compelled to capture its distinctive spirit and range of social and ethnic influences in anticipation of the ever advancing threat of gentrification. Multi-coloured and precariously balanced, the sculptures in his photographs stand as metaphors for the harmoniously clashing diversity of nationalities and cultures brought together in the Dalston community.
