How What Exists Exists

How What Exists Exists is Nicola Nunziata’s book on the photographic archive of Viaggio in Italia, the 1984 project organized by Luigi Ghirri, worked through the original prints held by the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea.

The archive holds 220 photographs by twenty photographers who were reworking how the Italian landscape was pictured. Nunziata studied the prints as physical objects: their formats, papers, surfaces, colors, the marks on the backs and the photographers’ signatures. A related exhibition, Come esiste quello che esiste, was curated by Roberta Valtorta and Matteo Balduzzi and opened in December 2012. Fw:Books published the book in 2015. It has 96 pages in a linen hardcover with a glassine dust jacket, plus a separate 16-page booklet with a text by Francesco Zanot, and Hans Gremmen designed it.

Nunziata’s own site says they have explored archives and collections since 2007. Fw:Books presents this book as the start of an Archival Trilogy, followed by Album (2018), drawn from the photo album collection of the ICCD in Rome, and Ando (2024), made in a photo library.