Two years of silence

Sara Magni is a Milan-based photographer specialising in portraiture and interior design commissions. She also self-publishes projects that reflect her interest in editorial storytelling and societal issues. Magni’s latest publication, Turn Out the Lights, examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the live music industry – the ‘two years of emptiness, of darkness, of silence,’ she writes in its introduction.

The photographs feature venues empty of artists and audiences alongside images of the equipment that the live music industry relies on. Amplifiers and smoke machines stand idle, crowd barriers lean against a tree. The images also evoke the toll the pandemic took on the industry’s workforce – the ‘session musicians, sound technicians, riggers, runners, promoters, bartenders’ who could no longer work.

Turn Out the Lights is printed in a limited edition of 70 and was designed by studio Atto. ‘We started from the concept of emptiness and designed a book based on the “less is more” concept: we only used the graphic elements that were necessary to the narration, and gave up any ornamental ambition,’ says Atto’s Andrea Zambardi. ‘The pages are not bound so that they can be framed and displayed, as if the book were a portable exhibition.’