Sandra Cattaneo Adorno: Scarti di Tempo

While on press for her second book, Águas de Ouro, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno noticed the brightly colored metal plates used to make test proofs. The plates, called “scarti” (Italian for “scraps”), showed her photographs as monochromes in shocking pink, bright yellow, royal blue, and black, evoking the spirit of Andy Warhol. A jolt of recognition coursed through her veins as Cattaneo Adorno realized the curious way in which photography can be used to preserve — and rearrange — fragments of time.

When the pandemic brought the world to a standstill in March 2020, Cattaneo Adorno noticed time began moving in strange ways, stretching endlessly into some unknown beyond but, if not preserved, disappearing from memory as though it never occurred. She began to feel as though she were accumulating “scraps” of time layering upon itself. Determined to give this experience form, Cattaneo Adorno began traveling through the inner space of her imagination. Delving through her archive, she began collaging otherwise unrelated images to create a series of new work that blurs the boundaries of reality and illusion as a metaphor for the mind.

In her third book, Scarti di Tempo, which means both “time discrepancy” and “scraps of time,” Cattaneo Adorno offers a meditation on perception: how we experience time, memory, connection, and the boundaries between reality and illusion. Moving away from representation, the photographs dissolve into abstraction, transporting us into another realm, the one they share with music and poetry. The book also contains a QR code that links to an original score composed by the artist’s husband, which provides an opportunity to experience the overlapping harmony of image and sound. Scarti di Tempo includes an introduction by Gueorgui Pinkhassov (b. 1969 in Moscow), award-winning Magnum photographer who has covered international events for four decades.

Sandra Cattaneo Adorno (b. 1953) took up photography in 2013 at the age of 60 and has since gained extensive recognition for her work. This year she debuts first solo exhibition at the 6th edition of Personal Structures, which runs parallel with the 59th Venice Biennale, April 23–November 27, 2022. The author of three monographs, The Other Half of the Sky (2019), Águas de Ouro, and Scarti di Tempo (Radius Books, 2020 and 2022), Cattaneo Adorno’s work was also published in Gulnara Samoilova’s landmark book Women Street Photographers (Prestel, 2021) and Portrait of Humanity (Hoxton Mini Press, 2019). Cattaneo Adorno received the 2021 and 2020 Julia Margaret Cameron Award, the 2020 International Photography Award, the 2019 Portrait of Humanity Award in collaboration with Magnum Photos, and was a 2019 National Geographic 100 finalist. She has exhibited work at Somerset House, London; Photoville, Brooklyn; Miami Street Photography Festival; Italian Photo Festival, Venice; Le Prix de la Photographie de Paris ( PX3 ); and Women Street Photographers Exhibition in Paris, among many others.