Photo, music, text

Opening on 1st April 2011 the exhibition will bring to Southampton?s Bargate Monument Gallery iconic figures of the grunge era and beyond with photographs of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, taken at the height of the Love and Cobain?s tumultuous and high-profile relationship. Photographs of celebrities in the magazines have been shot and styled as commodities for mass consumption. It is this distorting filter that Aline Giordano choses to disregard in her own photographic style. Indeed, she does not see the ?celebrity skin? rather she is interested in the individual and artist beneath it. Aline Giordano is a fanzine photographer and has been shooting and publishing photographs for her music fanzine since the beginning of the 1990s. She shoots the ordinariness that surrounds her at concerts, and has a special interest in shooting those artists on the ?fringes?. The result of being drawn towards the fringes and photographing them comes to life in her ?half-lit realism? photography. ?It?s dark but then it?s rarely shiny and cosy at the fringes?, she admits. Through her photographs and written contextualisation Aline Giordano argues that fanzine photography contributes to the re-writing of popular music history by providing complementing visual data taken with different, amateur and sometimes anti-expert production methods in line with the fanzine ethos. The exhibition explores the roles and functions of fanzine photographs in the critical discourse of popular music and how they convey different meanings to the mainstream stories. Aline Giordano personally met and interviewed most of the subjects she has photographed. By contextualising her photographs with her personal experiences she produces a naturally authentic piece that places itself as the embodiment of what Professor Chris Atton, leading expert in fanzine culture, describes as ?the anti-intellectualism of much fanzine writing?. Her account of her encounter with Courtney Love, the late Vic Chesnutt and Mark Linkous is truly moving. The exhibition is sponsored by Southampton Solent University where Aline Giordano is a Research and Enterprise Officer and Associate Lecturer in Popular Music.