LAVAZZA CALENDAR
Mastery From McCurry, LaChapelle +
With the barriers and distancing between individuals, communities and nations, Lavazza, the Italian coffee roaster, used this time to launch a new art project titled The New Humanity. “It was developed, designed, and devised during the lockdown,” said Francesca Lavazza. The project includes a calendar with an aim to show the resilience of the human spirit and to generate feelings of hope. The company’s statement says this is “a wake-up call to individual sensibility in the hope that from this long and difficult period we may see the rebirth of a society that values solidarity, inclusion, tolerance and sustainable development.”
The New Humanity 2021 calendar was a collaborative effort with 13 master photographers assigned to present humanity that reflects their viewpoints and style. They are David LaChapelle, Simone Bramante, Martin Schoeller, Ami Vitale, Christy Lee Rogers, Steve McCurry, Joey L., Carolyn Drake, Denis Rouvre, Eugenio Recuenco, Charlie Davoli, Martha Cooper, and TOILETPAPER. “We have chosen people who could narrate the present and bring us into a near future,” said Francesca Lavazza.
New York City-based photographer, Martin Schoeller, shot for the Lavazza calendar in front of his NYC home. “Everybody seems to be at war with each other, everything seems to be so intensely divided that I thought maybe it’s time to look each other in the eye more often,” shared Schoeller. Each photographer’s narrative is a reflection of their meaning of humanity. Joey Lawrence traveled to Ethiopia to capture the Bodi Me’en people, “When all the world economies tanked, the stock market collapsed, there is actually the Bodi Me’en people that show they have true wealth, and I think we have a lot to learn from these people,” said Laurence.
The New Humanity campaign also includes a magazine with six cultural “ambassadors” who reflect on the process of restarting and reopening from their personal experience and sensibility. These ambassadors are architect Carlo Ratti, designer Stella Jean, writer Alessandro Baricco, actress Kiera Chaplin, singer-songwriter Patti Smith and Save the Children International CEO Inger Ashing. Their works parallel photography, but by different forms of expression; a design, a written thought, a piece of music, an architectural project. “I like the idea of a new humanity because that’s really about new voices being heard and through that how we can build a different future,” said architect Carlo Ratti.
The project will support Save the Children, a longstanding Lavazza partner that works globally to save children at risk.
