Anthony Goicolea is a multidisciplinary American artist, of Cuban origins, born in 1971.  Goicolea is therefore not just a photographer, but I have focused on his narrative and photographic content (in his photographic works from 1999 to 2004) which mainly concern the transition phase from adolescence to adulthood.  With all the implications concerning identity, sexuality, taboos and the provocative reaction to stereotypes. Often the protagonists of his shots are adolescents who, despite the citation of conformist symbols such as the uniform used in schools, are inserted into dreamlike and surreal staging, sometimes ironic. https://www.anthonygoicoleastudio.com/albums/past-works-1999-2004/content/after-dusk/ (accessed on 04/01/2022) The images are digitally manipulated in order to allow the author to embody the different characters portrayed, or to self-clone. https://www.anthonygoicoleastudio.com/albums/past-works-1999-2004/content/morning-after/ (accessed on 04/01/2022) Anth...

During the work on Assignment 4 first, and then on Assignment 5 , I faced and developed, from different points of view, the theme of the double and the multiple. Many authors have developed this theme in their photographic work, using both analogue and digital techniques. There are elements common to the various authors, which we can summarize as follows: - the double and the multiple, whether obtained through analog or digital cloning, are functional to a dynamic narrative, which can be exhausted within the single image ( Anthony Goicolea , Cornelia Hediger, Martin Liebscher, Paul M. Smith ) or expressed in a sequence ( Duane Michals ) ; - the presence of the uncanny (ref. Freud), whether it refers to concepts such as the "memento mori" (Duane Michals), to childhood traumas ( Cornelia Hediger ), the search for identity, the Doppelgänger; - the  mise-en-scène:  formal and static  ( Thomas Struth , Chantal Michel )   or narrative (Martin Liebscher, Anthony Goicolea),...

This artist was suggested to me by my tutor in the feedback for assignment 4.  Struth's artistic work on family portraits influenced even part of my choices in assignment 5, w hich is in continuity with what was achieved in assignment 4. The story that is at the origin of the work on family portraits is curious: a psychoanalyst friend of Struth's, in fact, during the analysis process, had the patients bring portraits of his own family. In this way, the doctor could deduce the psychological context in which the patient lived from the position that the members of the family had, with respect to each other, and their expression.  Struth was fascinated by this method, especially its content, and decided to work on family portraits.  Seen in this key, the portraits made by the German artist are truly interesting and come out of the classic meaning that a family portrait can assume, which is both intimate and formal at the same time. Thomas Struth, The Richter family, Cologne, ...

  Pancalism s. m. [from English pancalism, comp. of pan- and of gr. καλός «beautiful»]. - Term coined by the American philosopher. J. M. Baldwin (1861-1934) to name his own speculative system, based on the idea of beauty as the only principle capable of unifying and absolutely reconciling the multiple aspects of reality. (from Treccani Vocabulary,  https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/pancalismo/ ) During the research I carried out on authors who deal with the theme of doppelganger and digital cloning applied to photographic composition, I found an association between the artist Chantal Michel (Swiss-born, 1968) and Pancalism.  "....The pancalistic answer is that the good and the true is so because it is beautiful. The final court of appeal is aesthetic. Nothing can be true without being beautiful, nor anything that is in any high sense good. The ascription of beauty, a reasoned, criticised, thought-out ascription of æsthetic quality, is the final form of our thought about...

  Martin Liebscher is a German artist, born in 1964. His photographic work, which is sublimated in the eloquent title "One for all", focuses on using himself as a multiple subject of his photographs.   Using the self-timer, Liebscher takes dozens to hundreds of photographs of himself in different positions and attitudes and a single environment. The individual photographs are not digitally manipulated, as instead the set of all the images which, when superimposed, produce the "One for all" effect. A good example of his style is represented by the image of a large theater full of hundreds of Liebscher-spectators. Martin Liebscher, Ohne Titel 1 ,  https://martinasbaek.com/artists/martin-liebscher/ It can be argued whether this style of representation has as its supporting structure a thought linked to the affirmation of one's identity in the world or whether it is a pure exercise of impressive graphic technique, but it is objective that the aesthetic and graphic r...