CHRISTOPHER BROADBENT "HERE TODAY [...]" | 3 - 9 April 2017, 5VIE Design Week | Spazio BIG Santa Marta, Milan | Press Preview monday 3 April

The photographic exhibition Christopher Broadbent “Here today […]” will be held in the Spazio BIG Santa Marta in Milan’s 5VIE neighbourhood, during Design Week 2017 from April 3rd to the 9th. This opportunity arose because the British photographer’s studio is located a stone’s throw from the ‘CINQUE VIE’ a quiet intersection in Milan’s old town.

Christopher Broadbent has lived and worked in the neighbourhood for more than forty years. He studied cinema and photography in Paris, worked for a few years in Rome on feature films as assistant director then moved to Milan to direct commercials. Since the 80’s he has turned to editorial and advertising photography, working frequently on commissions in northern Europe and the USA. From habit - and swimming against the digital tide, Broadbent uses a view-camera, long exposures and sheet film - tools with a strong link to craftsmanship. He builds the simple structures of traditional still-life with an orthogonal point-of-view, a few horizontal perspective planes and the chiaroscuro of window light.

Broadbent became known in the fields of illustrative photography and short commercials for his use of light and composition, winning international recognition and some coveted awards (a CLIO in America, the ADCI Hall-of-Fame, ADCI golds and silvers, and a bronze at the Cannes International Advertising Festival). In 2000, he decided to dedicate his time to still-life photography as an art-form in where immediacy gives place to time indefinite. This is how his still-life images and the series “Here today […]” came to be (from the saying ‘here today, gone tomorrow’): here everyday things are actors on a stage suspended in time, perhaps forgotten or put aside the shadows. Occasionally, there are flowers just surviving. Broadbent represents the fading away of time, through images in which light becomes a tool that explores the present moment and the passing beauty. A thread of raffia with bends and knots appears as a recurring theme: «The thread – explains Broadbent – helps me link the elements of the structure together, but if we need to apply a symbolic meaning to the thread, it would represent the contorted flow of existence».

The narrative structure of this exhibition consists of 20 photographs that were created over the past five years.

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