PRESS RELEASE
Ulisse
A project by Marc Ohrem-Leclef
Marc Ohrem-Leclef was 21, vacationing in Lipari from Germany when he met Ulisse, an Italian youth who was with a group of his friends from Bologna. Marc joined them on a boat ride and took pictures but was shy about photographing Ulisse himself, his new infatuation, except for the one picture we have from the back, a closeup of his head, neck, and shoulders: it is smoldering, evidence of an undeclared summer love.
Marc moves to New York, and his world opens up. He nds himself, he nds love, he pursues photography, but something calls him back, after many years, to Lipari, in the Aeolian Islands of Sicily, and this time he meets two brothers, Zouhair and Fakher, local vendors of Moroccan descent, renting beach umbrellas and air mattresses for the rocky beach. He photographs them at work, and with their cousin, diving off cliffs into the Tyrrhenian Sea. The ferry taking passengers among the islands is called Ulisse.
On his rst trip to Lipari, Marc discovers an abandoned house and letters from the 1940s, sent by a woman named Caterina Liberatore in Dobbs Ferry, New York. She misses her family, longs to see them. On his recent return, Marc explores the island again, visits the quarries. Lipari is famous for centuries of pumice mining, shut down in 2007.
He photographs a Christ gure in a church niche, a big curtain blown over his shoulder, as if to keep him warm. He brings home a chunk of obsidian, part of the volcanic ow, also once mined in Lipari. Back in New York, he visits Dobbs Ferry, in search of Caterina, but the family has long since moved on. Still, he befriends a young woman named Karen watching birds by the Hudson, and now he sends postcards to Zouhair and Fakher, who have moved to Australia and are working in its mines.
The photographs and ephemera Marc has collected here are a personal, poetic log of random and fateful occurrences, suggesting stories of desire and migration. The threads between them are tenuous, spanning years and geographies of overlapping quests. Piecing them together is an act of faith.
- Allen Frame (April 2024)
