THERE'S something about Tom Ford.
I don't know if it is just the devilish good looks, the straight out sauciness or the hint of Botox, but whatever it is, me likey.
Apparently the jury at this year's Venice Film Festival half what agrees. They awarded him the Silver Lion for Nocturnal Animals. Well, half of the award for Best Director anyway, as he had to share it with Amat Escalante who was also awarded for Untamed.
Those jurists were clearly feeling a bit frisky, and wanted to give in to their wild sides based on the titles of those films.
But seriously, Tom Ford is an icon and a reminder that you too can be recognised and rewarded for your brilliance, even if your past involves getting down and dirty with inanimate objects!

A dear friend of mine is involved with a recently launched project based on the conversation about place and you should check it out.
If you're a fan of publications like Monocle that are all about the idea of connection with place and improving the (mostly) urban experience, but you don't need all the gratuitous product placement and emphasis on luxury goods, you might want to check out the In Place online platform instead.
There's an Asian Pacific slant to it: not a bad thing considering how well Aussie and Kiwi cities tend to poll in liveable city indexes and how well they rate for community spirit and engagement compared to other places.
Some interesting and really well written (and edited) pieces over on the website which you can visit here.

Photography is pretty much always in flux. Its increasing shift towards multi formatting has altered the landscape and opportunities for the current generation of photographers.
In some ways, this creates a challenge for events like Bitume Urban Layers which champion large scale works that are reproduced and exhibited in public areas.
But as gratifying as a large scale exhibit is for both photographers and curators, the reality is that many contemporary photographers are favouring their own small scale, self-produced books.
Working within a book format allows for freedoms that large scale work sometimes doesn’t: it enables photographers to create extended narratives within a setting that's ultimately more flexible than the large scale, and which can of course be reproduced [and sold] at will.
Some work naturally lends itself to being reproduced on different scales: Sam Harris’ In the Middle of Somewhere - winner of the 2015 Australian Photobook of the Year Award - is an example of this: an intriguing selection of the images holding court in one of Lecce's prettiest piazzas - while the book reads as a gorgeous travelogue/diary etched out between India and Australia.
The shifting lure of crossing fixed borders is the strongest theme to have arisen from the 2016 Identity Flows edition of Urban Layers - both in print and on the walls. How could it not be? The idea of immigration has transfixed us and is taunting us all, wherever we are in the world.

And just as everyone has their own layered opinion on the matter, each of the Bitume photographers who address the theme of immigration and borders does it in their own style and from their own perspective. The first of my favourites this year on this topic - Ekaterina Vasilyeva - a participant in last year's festival - takes a personal approach to the topic. She returns to her native, rural Russia, documenting her journey on the hundred year old, thirty two kilometre stretch that separates Petergof from St. Petersburg with new eyes. Everything is familiar but somehow different because its the return from a journey that defines the travel experience more than the travel itself.

A similar sense of familiar but strange marks the work of Fabrizio Albertini's Diary of an Italian Border Worker. This is a project that marries and blurs the concepts of travel and borders. His project lends something ethereal to something we are so used to understanding in black and white terms. As an Italian who has grown up near the Swiss border, Albertini's work is a brief, 'confused' pause and reflection on the phenomenon of his 60,000 neighbours who cross the Swiss/Italian border for work and who, in doing so, enter into an uneasy treaty between the familiar and foreign.

The sensation of flux isn't limited to the idea of people from moving place to place. Its something that can be experienced in the one place, when identity shifts.
Bitume takes place in Lecce - for years, an unknown and unforgotten part of Italy. Closer to Albania than Rome, and a regular stop on the African migration route, Lecce is now regarded as the jewel of the Salento [southern Puglia] and is the focal point of a renewed appreciation of the area.
Salento is a place now noted for its olive groves, beautiful beaches and its natural beauty. Each September it begins its recovery from the growing influx of hundreds of thousands of tourists that brings with it both new opportunities but also incredible strain and exploitation on local resources.
Local photographer, Alessia Rollo, takes this into consideration with her Fata Morgana project. Despite the allure of Europe as a destination for migrants and a growing luxury tourist industry in Salento, it's still by and large an agricultural area, powered as much by the tourist dollar as it is plagued by illegal, exploitative labour practices of the migrants who pass through it.
At one point, Rollo's series uses the leitmotif of the year to provide the festival with one of its strongest images -  a figure wrapped in a space blanket. It's an object which has become synonymous with the thousands of at-sea rescues taking place just a few hundred kilometres from South Italy's shores. It's a leitmotif that reappears throughout various photographers' works and which has become an unofficial emblem of the refugee crisis. Its visual importance even led to one being unfurled on Saturday night, symbolically taking the place of the EU flag on one of Lecce's public  buildings. Elsewhere, Rollo's photos take on a local view of the symbols and views that mark the Salento experience in contrast to the glossy, tourist industry's own.

There's a lot more on show this week. For more information on the Bitume exhibition visit their website, Facebook or twitter pages. Bitume's Photobook 2016 expo - dedicated to the growing photobook niche kicks off tonight.

Just for something different, I'm having another face palm day here in Italy. I know right? Life is full of surprises.
I don't know about you but the countries that I have spent the most amount of time living in all have the same problem: a population that is getting older. Some deal with it by trying to entice young, upwardly professionals over, but, immigration being the dirty word that it is now makes that a touchy subject.
Thank God for the Italian government. They've brought ingenuity to the problem.
You see, Italy is chock full of oldies. Oldies that the government tries to throw a pension at and ignore. You see, the mentality is largely, 'here, take your cash but don't come a knocking for any support: you want home care? You can pay for it with that wad you just risked your life withdrawing or, be a good Italian parent and ensure your own children look after you."
Don't worry. The government's ignorance towards its aged citizens is matched only by the contempt it has for its youth. Youth unemployment is currently at 39.2%. No, it's not  a typo. 39.2% - with no real hope of improving at least in the forseeable future. [The national figure is 11.4%.] Those that are in work are most likely to be on temporary contracts, or worse, as I can attest, working as independent contractors who, regardless of how little they might be earning, have to pay thousands of euros worth of retirement contributions out of their own pocket in addition to their taxes even if this equates to more than 50% of their salary.
Italian families also have it tough: there's very little in the way of public childcare here: it's mostly a private gig and an out of pocket scenario meaning those grandparents better put aside some cash to make sure there's always a Kinder surprise in the house for those pesky grandchildren.
To address the problem of the growing grey army, the Italian government, in its infinite wisdom, has declared September 22 to be Fertility Day. Basically a stay in and procreate day. This week, it launched a particularly gruesome online campaign right out of the 1950s. The above images respectively translate as: "Beauty has no age but fertility does" and "Fertility is a public asset".

Leaving aside the economic absurdity of straight out encouraging people to have children in a country whose economy is on the brink of collapse [in 2013 more than 90,000 young Italians left Italy in the search for work elsewhere], the campaign has also touched off debate about people - especially women's - right to choose what they want to do with their bodies and the life choices they make. The tone of the government's approach is shockingly old school - basically labeling women as incubators for the public. Additionally, the emphasis on fertility has been perceived as a tactless affront to those with fertility issues, or, construed as a campaign to make people feel guilty about having children later [if at all]. This in a country where most women need to go abroad in order to have fertility treatment if they're having trouble conceiving.

Italians were already weary enough of their government. Growing numbers are rejecting the established parties in favour of the new, populist reactionary groups like Cinque stelle. This kind of propaganda is seen for what it is: an out of touch campaign based on the Italian guilt complex that many grew up with but no longer tolerate.
That it made it through so many levels of government, that so many people clearly worked on it to get it out into the public is incredulous. Did nobody stop to think for a moment the outcry this was going to cause?
Say what you want about Italians, but they're not afraid to share their opinion on things, especially if the topic is divisive. The huge debate that these images and the ideas driving them has created led to reports of the #fertilityday website being shut down last night, just hours after it went live.
The debate though will rage over the coming weeks but the damage has already been done.