The subject of Simone Donnati’s project Faith Exposed, is Italy, his native country, more specifically Berlusconi-era Italy that in some ways foreshadowed what was to happen in the United States in 2016: a flashy billionaire with an impossibly orange face and dubious behaviour (to phrase it very mildly) making it into the country's highest office.

Donati started out photographing Berlusconi's supporters for a year and a half, producing Welcome to Berlusconistan. On an assignment for Vanity Fair Italy, he then moved on to create a series on San Giovanni Rotondo, the town of Saint Padre Pio.

'Looking at these two series,' Donnati notes, 'made me realise how I was drawn to look in places and situations where people meet to follow something or somebody, to the concept of 'faith,' [whether] political or religious.' This is how Hotel Immagine was born (the project inherited its title from the name of a hotel in San Giovanni Rotondo – 'immagine' is Italian for 'image').

The faith Donati was looking for could be found outside religion and politics as well, in areas such as sports or entertainment. He said he viewed the work 'more like a cultural and anthropological commentary,' being 'mainly interested in these themes as a person, and then as a photographer.' Donati's slightly detached colour square photographs connect seemingly disjointed threads into a unified whole.

In the book, Donati uses a set of interludes of sorts, in which a full-bleed picture of a crowd is combined with anonymous quotes sourced from Facebook. With their uncorrected spelling, grammar, and punctuation, these quotes and other expressions of faith, come from the work's subjects: 'Silvio deliver us from evil amen', 'Let's do another march on Rome, dammit I've been saying it all my life. we have to do it again', or 'the virgin mary gave me a sign mario'. 

Sites like Facebook have been turned into carefully parcelled-up mini worlds, in which we congregate with those who are like us (and exclude or avoid those who aren't), and which conform to what we would like the real world to be. In other words, faith is expressed in those particular ways available online (words, pictures, and videos).

While to some extent acknowledging the inner core of faith, Donati aptly dismantles the spectacle it has become. The orange statesman becomes a saviour much like the saint or the pop star or the stripper on stage. It's all really just a spectacle, but it's also a spectacle with actual consequences. The spectacle fuels itself, spiralling around a spiritually and culturally dead centre, rotting the foundations of a society whose aspirations originally were and maybe still are civil. This is the kind of faith exposed by Simone Donati in Hotel Immagine. 

This text is an excerpt of an article written by Jörg Colberg about Simone Donnati’s project Faith Exposed, originally published in Foam Magazine 47, Propaganda, in 2017.

SIMONE DONATI (Florence, 1977), is one of the founders of TerraProject collective which has been working on social, political and environmental issues in Italy and abroad since 2006. His photography mainly talks about the Italian territory, with long-term projects where slowness and depth are the basis, together with a documentary approach. His research is characterised by the study of the landscape and its relationship with the people. In the years 2009- 2015 his attention was focused on the Italian political and social situation with the publication of Hotel Immagine , his first book result of a self-production. With Varco Appennino, published by Witty Books in 2021, he pursued an exploration of the inland areas of the southern Italian Apennines for 4 years. His images are exhibited in Italy and abroad and are published by major Italian and foreign magazines. Simone is based between Florence and the Casentino valley (AR).

JÖRG COLBERG is a self-taught writer and photographer; he is also an educator at Hartford Art School. Since its inception in 2002, his website Conscientious has become one of the most widely read and influential blogs dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography. His writing has been published in the the British Journal of Photography and Creative review amongst many others.