ROMA CODEX

The exhibition Roma Codex by Albert Watson, on view at Palazzo Esposizioni Roma, is a visual exercise that deliberately avoids any celebratory rhetoric. Featuring around 200 black-and-white and color photographs—many in large format—the exhibition rejects a coherent thematic structure in favor of a distinctly “instinctive” logic, echoing the apparent randomness of the urban experience.
Watson consciously distances himself from a canonical documentary approach, instead presenting himself as an emotional cartographer of a Rome lived rather than merely observed. The result is a hybrid and fragmented mapping, where historical monumentality coexists with anonymous everyday life, and the temporal layers of the city unfold as a juxtaposition of heterogeneous subjects: famous faces, passersby, iconic architecture, and residual spaces.
The exhibition layout imposes no fixed path, reflecting the photographer’s intention to avoid prescriptive narratives. The absence of subject hierarchy portrays Rome as a fluid organism, traversed by tensions between historical permanence and social change. Rather than telling a story, the photographer seems to collect fragments—glimpses, gestures, presences—that reveal a city crowded yet inscrutable, layered yet never complete.
The inclusion of local cultural and artistic figures introduces a representational dimension that touches on celebration, while remaining restrained and formal. The overall impression is a deliberately discontinuous and heterogeneous visual synthesis, forsaking stylistic unity to depict the city as a field of forces in perpetual contradiction.
As a whole, Roma Codex is a partial and subjective atlas that does not aim to explain Rome but rather to evoke its state of constant transformation.