Through his ongoing project Revelation, Lorenzo Meloni discusses a shift in his practice, away from the front lines and towards the infrastructures, technologies and environments that shape contemporary life.
For over a decade, you photographed war. Revelation seems to begin where the battlefield disappears from the images. What were you looking for?
Lorenzo Meloni: The battlefield is where consequences become visible, but rarely where they begin. After many years spent on front lines, I felt the need to look at what comes before: the infrastructures, resources, technologies and material processes through which societies turn decisions into physical realities.
I photographed mines, power plants, laboratories, industrial sites and military infrastructures: places of extraction, research, measurement, production, testing, maintenance and dismantling.
Revelation looks more broadly at the systems and technologies that shape contemporary life, often long before their consequences become visible.
"Knowing what we are looking at can be important, but it can also close down the experience of the image too quickly. "
- Lorenzo Meloni
In the photographs, the function of the places is not always immediately recognisable, and people rarely appear. Why did you choose this distance?
I did not want each image to be exhausted by the explanation of its function. Knowing what we are looking at can be important, but it can also close down the experience of the image too quickly.
Many of these structures are highly specialised, yet once isolated from their context they become almost indecipherable. An anechoic chamber, covered with thousands of absorbing elements, reminds me of an empty theatre or a place of worship. The one I photographed is a controlled test facility used to evaluate missile guidance systems and airborne tracking radars. This opacity is not there to create mystery. It comes from the specialisation and scale of systems that very few people can understand in their entirety.
I also wanted to move the human away from the centre of the image in order to observe the structures through which contemporary societies organise knowledge, energy, security and production. Photographing a technician or researcher at work would have pulled each image back towards a recognisable role and gesture.
For me, photographing becomes a process of reverse engineering: I observe these places to ask what priorities they embody and what futures they make possible.
In many images, nature seems to exist inside a system: a butterfly in a reconstructed environment, a palm tree under artificial light, water transformed by a detonation. What interests you in this relationship between observation and control?
I am interested in places where nature is observed, contained, reconstructed or simulated.
We reproduce extreme conditions in laboratories, dig into mountains, manipulate materials and create artificial ecosystems for research or conservation. Nature is no longer simply what exists outside human intervention. It becomes part of a system of chambers, protocols and infrastructures.
But control is never complete. The more we try to make these processes predictable, the more dependent we become on systems with limits of their own. A lava flow makes that boundary visible: we can predict it, divert it and measure it, but we cannot truly contain it.
This uncertainty allows a quarry, a lava flow, electronic waste and a reactor to occupy the same space in the project. What appears to be a cave is in fact a quarry, later adapted during the German occupation for a facility intended to produce liquid oxygen for V2 missiles. It is not untouched nature, but matter traversed by labour, industry and history.
Some infrastructures were built as projections of the future. Others use extremely advanced technologies to address very ancient needs. In these images, the future can already appear as a ruin.
"The image [then] has two lives: a first, immediate reading; and a second, which arrives through closer observation, raising a doubt instead of offering an explanation."
- Lorenzo Meloni
The photographs are often seductive, even when they show military devices, industrial processes or hostile environments. Why is beauty so important in the project?
Beauty, for me, is a trap. It is a language that comes before understanding. Beautiful, yes, but what am I looking at?
It is the same language I used in war photography: there too, a frame could be composed, formal, even elegant, while depicting devastation.
The photograph of the column of water produced by an underwater detonation draws the eye before it is possible to identify its origin. From a distance, it could have the wonder of a natural phenomenon, almost like a geyser. Only by looking closely do we understand that it comes from an explosion.
The image then has two lives: a first, immediate reading; and a second, which arrives through closer observation, raising a doubt instead of offering an explanation.
What, then, is revealed in Revelation?
The title comes from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning unveiling, but I do not think of revelation as the discovery of a hidden truth that the photographs finally make comprehensible.
A photograph is a fragile tool for explaining complex processes. It is two-dimensional, silent and partial. It cannot, on its own, represent the entire political, economic or technological chain that produces a place. But this limit can become its strength: a photograph does not have to explain. It can hold distant elements together, create short circuits and open up metaphors.
An image can therefore lift a veil and immediately reveal another layer. A scientific infrastructure may also have an industrial or military application; a conservation apparatus may involve complex forms of intervention; an apparently natural form may result from a technical process.
Revelation is not an answer. It is the moment when the image makes something visible and, instead of closing meaning down, complicates it.