TITLE: The 9th Horse

At the intersection of documentary and fiction, The 9th Horse sheds light on the life of a band of semi-feral horses after losing a foal in a wolf attack. Unable to bridge both the loneliness and the grief resulting from the loss, the surviving horses and their groom go back with their memories to the time spent together and evoke the spirit of their friend.

The photographic process reflects such inability by resorting on video surveillance infra-red illuminators as the only light source lighting the new-moon night scenes. These are lights that are outside the visible spectrum, and, as such, they cannot be seen, just like the lost friend, by all the mammals – photographer included.

By repurposing imaging technology for doing video surveillance to the photographic space the lays at the intersection of fine-arts and documentary, I intend to turn surveillance technology towards myself; to record in my images the resulting introspective and confessional investigations. Like humans, horses are in fact gregarious animals, that suffer for the loss of one of their family members. In a sense, the prairie, and its inhabitants, are the allegory of our feeling of loneliness.
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“Loneliness, thy other name, thy one true synonym, is prairie.” — William A. Quayle, The Prairie and the Sea (1905)

AUTHOR: Alfonso De Gregorio (United Arab Emirates)

Alfonso de Gregorio is an Italian artist, working with speculative documentary photography, computer science, and mixed media. In his artistic practice, Alfonso examines the aesthetics and politics of surveillance, traumatic memory, and sustainability. Alfonso’s works have been exhibited around the world since he began making images in 2017, including at Voies Off (2019), Riga Photomonth (2019), Photoville (2018), Batumi Photo Days (2018), and SFMoMA (2017). In 2019, GUP Magazine has named him FRESH EYES talent, and included his works in an anthology celebrating the greatest emerging talents Europe has to offer. Alfonso is two times Winner of the Allard Prize Photography Contest and is reported to occasionally enjoying writing about himself in the third person.