6th Continent by Mattia Insolera
Mattia Insolera is a Bologna-born, Barcelona-based documentary photographer whose work has been recognised by the World Press Photo Award, the Fotopres Award from the Caixa Foundation, the MIA Award, and the Mare Nostrum Award, and who has collaborated with Médecins Sans Frontières on migration documentation in the southern Mediterranean.
The title draws from a Turkish writer known as the Fisherman of Halikarnassos, who described the Mediterranean not as a sea but as a continent unto itself, assimilating peoples from across the earth and binding them into something shared. 6th Continent is the result of seven years of work across 13 Mediterranean countries, 25,000 kilometres by motorbike and 15,000 nautical miles by boat. Published by Neverland Publications in 2015, the book’s 102 photographs focus not on the Mediterranean of postcards and tourism, but on the people who live and work on the sea, seamen and dockers, migrants, fishermen, and shipyard workers, those for whom the Mediterranean remains what it has always been: a surface for transportation, a place of exchange, a world apart.
de.MO designed the book, a documentary photography book design for a project of unusual scope and ambition, bringing visual coherence to a body of work that spans a decade and a continent.
