William Guerrieri : The Dairy (Images for the Italian Countryside)

The Italian agricultural landscape has been subjected to gradual abandonment in the wake of economic and social changes that started in the nineties. Many small farmers closed their farms for good. Thus, many farms were abandoned and with them, many modern dairies producing the famous Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. This paved the way towards a new kind of industrial cheese production.The book presents a photographic and iconographic enquiry carried out since 2011 on a dairy in Emilia-Romagna region, once looked upon as a modern model for the production of the famous Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, yet closed since 2007, and likely to remain unused for years to come. The relationships between the images of the dairy, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and the surrounding landscape and old photographs of the production process taken in the early sixties explore a new social and economic reality and the landscape, where the signs of abandonment and crisis are increasingly evident.