True Peace and False

Thiago Dezan

Publisher
Artphilein Editions
Year
2026
ISBN
9791280830548
Specifications
Hardcover with tipped-in image
16 x 23 cm
136 pages
Edition of 250 copies
English
Text by Thiago Dezan
Editorial supervision: Giulia Brivio
Design: Michele Brianza

True Peace and False is a photographic exploration of the fragile boundaries between survival, faith, and abandonment in contemporary society. The title originates from an encounter with a homeless woman who showed the artist a religious pamphlet bearing those words on its cover. Her intimate gesture crystallised the paradox at the heart of the project: the coexistence of despair and resilience, of destruction and fleeting hope. Over the course of several years, Thiago Dezan photographed in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Italy, and France, moving through abandoned buildings, squats, city streets, and hidden corners where people live outside the structures of protection that most take for granted. The result is a body of more than one hundred photographs that refuses to look away, exposing realities often concealed or ignored. The work also reveals fragments of dignity, rituals of care, and moments in which faith becomes a fragile anchor against collapse. The book is not only about suffering, but also about the human capacity to endure, to invent meaning, and to insist on life in the face of violence and neglect. At its core, True Peace and False is a meditation on visibility and absence, on what societies choose to acknowledge and what they prefer to forget. It is both a call to bear witness to lives too often overlooked and a reminder that behind every image of deprivation there remains a person: complex, resilient, and profoundly human.

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