Index Naturae

Index Naturae brings together a collection of 116 photo books published in the last five years on the theme of nature, collected and displayed on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title presented at OMNEFEST 2023, a festival of photography placed in Castelfranco Veneto, near Treviso. Excluding a priori the geographical limit, the research proposes experiences on the theme of five continents that find a specific reference in the origin of the author involved or in the place of investigation. 

This book is a sort of encyclopedic book, a “book of books” in which every entry, that is, every book, offers itself as a tool capable of suggesting different trajectories of interpretation of nature, of its constituent elements and the relationship that man has with them today. Index Naturae therefore suggests a system of unexpected relationships that – as Gianfranco Baruchello states – simulates the complexity of the associative processes of the mind. In this sense, if the photo–of–photo on the one hand generates a loss of quality, on the other increases the conceptual potential of the images.

The book is made up of 3 distinct sections. In the first section, 116 photographic pieces, one for each selected book, are presented on a 1:1 scale and talk to each other. So, they create a new original photographic story, which offers a universal look at the theme of "nature" in the contemporary publishing. In the second section, the book presents all the publications in a rigorous alphabetical index, complete with cover, author, title and abstract. In the third section, heart of the volume, the index of the books is reported with all the technical information useful as a starting point for possible research and studies on the topic.