Apr. 5 - On April 12th, the " Rome Photo Workshops" will present the photographic exhibition "The Red Thistle", a long-term project by award-winning photographer Davide Monteleone. The reportage portrays the faces and stories of those who live and inhabit the regions of the northern Caucasus, focusing on the signs and consequences left by two centuries of disputes and fights, also by the strong geopolitical interests at stake. The Caucasus is an exhausted by conflict deriving from ethnic and religious diversity: a place on which it is hard to get information, off the beaten track of journalists and Western reporters. For four years, from 2008 to the end of 2011, Davide Monteleone traveled in the northern Caucasus taking the photographs that make up the project "Red Thistle", title inspired by the Leo Tolstoy novel. The name comes from the first Russian Campaing in the Caucasus, during the times of Imam Shamil, at the end of the 19th century. Tolstoy used the red thistle - a beautiful but pungent flower - as a metaphor for the attitude of the Hadji Murad guerrilla, hostile to the annexation of Chechnya to Russia and supporter of Caucasian independentist movements. The red thistle symbolized the Chechen people and their desire for separatism, juxtaposed to the strength of the Russian army. Monteleone documents with extreme care today’s reality: still divided between the claim of independence and the pride attached to their diversity, but subordinated to the economic, historical and political affiliations that shape the quest for a new post-Soviet identity.

THE RED THISTLE
The curator of the Monteleone project, Renata Ferri, writes, in the afterword of the Italian edition of the book "The Red Thistle", that the author "describes an intimate world alternated to the vision of the wounded and desolate landscape - in a balanced dialogue between the individual and the environment. In every single picture - continues Ferri - there's a complex story, in which the photographer takes on the challenging role of witness and guardian of the memories, weaving together the stories of the Caucasus with the stories of men and women." A narrative that gives the complexity of cultures, situations and interactions, poised between tradition and modernity, showing the fragility and the facets of a life suspended between past and present, facing an uncertain future. Red Thistle has been declared the winner of the European Publishers Award for Photography 2011 and has been published by five different publishers (in Italy, under the title Il Cardo Rosso by Peliti Publisher).