It’s true we live in a dimension of constant overexposure to images and that Mia doesn’t do much to remedy this situation, gathering over 90 Italian and foreign photo galleries, giving space to hundreds of authors and exhibiting in the unique space of The Mall in Piazza Bo in Milan, an incalculable number of photographs. Too many for careful observation that many of them deserve; but enough to get an idea of the trends of contemporary photography: among tributes to other countries (particular attention was dedicated this year to Hungary), great classics, contemporary masters like Steve McCurry or Sebastiao Salgado, new emerging stars, and many photographers less known but often worthy of interest. Impossible account for all or a lot of them, I still try a reckless and approximate ride (leaving out in principle the greatest ones, about which everything has already been said) through the sea of images present in the exhibition-market (if you have any walls to be filled up, ready for next year: it is also an excellent opportunity to make purchases). The choice of galleries focuses on the art and research photos, thus deliberately neglecting, or just touching, the reportage, the news photo, the fashion photo, the naturalistic photo (even if some galleries focus on the latter, offering interesting selections, such as Made4Art or Still photography, which also shows the dramatic trees of Ninni Pepe). Talking about the relationship between photography and art, it is bizarre to note as on the one hand contemporary figurative art (an illuminating overview has recently been provided by another Milan fair, the Affordable Art Fair) falls to contaminate often, and very willingly, with the pop culture and the kitsch inside mass culture, photography, in a mirroring and opposite movement, aspires to rise and dignify itself by inspiring or citing the great art of the past. The metaphysical landscapes by De Chirico or Savinio have been mentioned several times (the sculptures that Romana Zambon photographs at the center of marble quarries, postponing seascapes, the scenarios of Wang Ping); Mauro Davoli inspires his still lifes to Caravaggio, evoking them from the dark through blades of light, and Francesca Moscheni turns to black compositions in Morandi style; Alfa Castoldi portrays a Klimt's Danae, while the collage of the brazilian Vik Muniz is placed between Guttuso and Flemish painting, where the large figures are composed of tiny photographic clippings, and moroccan Mounir Fatmi refers even to Beato Angelico, putting angels in an operating room. In fact, the African is a rather surprising and interesting presence. Quoting Picasso by After les demoiselles d'Avignon, Siwa Mgoboza, with its colorful afro-textile sets, has won the honor of providing the symbol image of Mia's 2018 edition. Uohe Okpa-Iroha triggers a hilarious and refined cultural short circuit by inserting his presence as a colored man in the frames of the Italian-American Il Padrino saga. Between dandysmo and reflection about impact of technology on the African continent, Maurice Mbikayi, born in Congo and living in South African, places at the center of his images of elves covered with keyboards and computer cables. The images of Gosette Lubondo, who portrays various colored characters within a symbolic railway wagon, stationary and in disuse, are metaphorically stated. Some authors even struggle against one of the natural and intrinsic feature of photography, the two-dimensionality. Mario Crisci, for example, makes cubist the face of Picasso, extruding it from the surface to the third dimension; Alfred Drago Rens, with the series Tutto quadra, builds over the photos stepped pyramids photographic paper made, highlighting (as well as areas of color) the focal points of the photos. Miranda Gibilisco dares even more, giving her water picture an evocative ripple that alludes to the marine movement. The search for an alternative to the flatness of the traditional photo also passes for the choice of unconventional supports: Jacopo Di Cera realizes a beautiful work on the earthquake of Amatrice photographing rubble and reproducing them on rippled and rough paper that give volume and movement to the memory of the earthquake. Manuel Felisi, on the other hand, prints his own trees on blocks of reinforced concrete, mixing graphism and materiality, nature and artefacts, the design of photography and that of matter, where the further texture of the metal that innervates it emerges from the granularity of the cement. The photographs by Anna Maria Tulli also interacts with the wall surfaces, drawing from the pictures of walls the silhouettes of a phantom zoo printed on plexiglass. If Lucrezia Roda looks for the reality and the beauty of matter in metals, up to the microscopic dimension, the musician Pietro Pirelli subtracts instead the weight of matter elaborating objects/environments where the photographic image springs from the interaction of light with water and bodies, moving by sound waves. From the informal abstractionism of the color trails of Michael E. Crawford, we pass to the colorful spellings of Glores, which picks up signs playing on light, shadows and bright colors, to the images of Carlo Borlenghi, who, photographing suggestively sails and sea, brings us back from an apparent abstraction to a realistic and naturalistic dimension. The exhibited landscape photos rarely content to reproduce the beauty or even unusual aspects of reality and nature. Some authors explicitly point to a sort of extremism of the visible, which sometimes becomes a marginalization or a re-marginalization of the landscape itself; sometimes it oscillates between its denial and its reconstruction. Giacomo Montanaro with the Interior Landscapes and Enrico Cattaneo dissolve for example and redesign phantasy landscapes simply through the action of acids on sensitive surfaces; while the zenithal photograph (last year well represented by Mario Sestini) of Rose, all played on the surprising graphic effects of the verticalization, responds to the horizontality of Luca Lupi’s landscapes, which relegates the horizon line to the lower edge of the image, dominated by great colorless skies. At other times, the landscape tends to dissolve in the light (the snowy woods of Hokkaido by Season Lao, the glaciers of Nicolò Aiazzi) or in the dark (Perdersi nella notte of Fausto Meli, Unreal by Giacomo Infantino). The saturated and bright colors (contrasted by black skies) of the Venice of Carmela Cipriani are a pleasant exception. Nature also often expresses itself through its negation: the olive trees plagued by the xylella of Ulderico Tramacere, the severed trunks of Lorand Vakarcs, the trees reflected in the water by Pina Inferrera; becoming citation in Alfred Drago Rens's fingers, from which plants flow, up to translate into its opposite in the photogenic textures of the hungarian Laszlo Meszaros, made of recyclable waste. A similar denial or reinvention of the forms of reality is proposed by many photos of architecture, generating images often suggestive and unsettling: setted in Milan, Robert Gligorov performs the blasphemous act of erasing the Duomo from a large photo taken from the back of the square, giving life to an unpublished and dystopian architectural space. Other authors build dreamy and perturbing architectures, which maintain a reference to the real but falsify it, as in Utopias of Philippe Calandre (which recall the visions of Bocklin) or in the multi-exposed landscapes by Davide Bramante. The iranian Gohar Dashti resumes environments where human buildings, deserted, are invaded and pervaded by a coming back nature. Marco Palmieri dissolves the architectural space or redefines it through minimalist play of lines drawn by light and shadow, while Nicole Ahland, from Germany, evokes ghosts with luminous cuts in environments dominated by the penumbra and Angela Lo Priore prefers the graphism of the stairwells, embedding surrealistic women nudes inside metaphoric spirals-eyes. Between abstractionism and desolate and ruined interiors (Ceramica Lago by Alessandra Battaggi, the interiors photographed by romanian Stefan Badulescu or by Nicola Vinci), architecture often certifies the absence of man, almost denied by geometric rigor or disappeared from places (from the world?) once inhabited. Nicolas Boutruche takes a very different approach, portraying, as in Grand Hotel, through the composition of multiple shots, large architectural caskets filled with human figures in the most diverse attitudes, with a playful, desecrating and amusing spirit. A satirical attitude, more openly political, based on the composition in the same picture of multiple figures, animates the fantastic photographs of Marco Guenzi. Nature and architecture often merge into a mental dimension, linked to memory. The Alydem Gallery dedicates its space to les grandes anonymes, archival photographs without proven paternity, while Marco Rigamonti plunges his trees into balsamic vinegar baths that transform them into vintage images, and Beat Kuert exposes mountains noted by a minute writing that alludes to remote or imaginary explorations. Still to imagination and memory recall the images, including intimate interiors and a suspended elsewhere, by Vera Rossi or the israeli Yuval Yairi, up to the declared whispering memories of Stefano Zardini. Human body and face are at the center of of many other photographers research: the Chinese Sun Li traces human features and surprising expressiveness in the close-up of surveillance cameras, while on the contrary his famous compatriot Liu Bolin disappears in every image, completely absorbed from backgrounds,also very complex, thanks to the meticulous painting camouflage on body and clothes. Human face and identity are distorted by deformations in the photos by Bruno Metra, from ropes, bandages and smoke in those by Malena Mazza, split into the doublefaced by Sebastiano Biniek, blend with the material in the marble portraits by Andrea Boyer, melt in waterfalls in the beautiful great Tom Hoops’s portraits, metamorphosed into animal identities in the hyperrealistic shots by Phil van Duyden. Lady Tarin owes the most eroticized images; while, among the celebrities portraits by Harry Benson, Trump Close Up Money stands out, with a young Donald happy as a child, overwhelmed by an armful of beloved banknotes...