It is not down in any map; true places never are.
— Herman Melville, MOBY-DICK, or The Whale

From 2013 to 2023, Matteo Di Giovanni (b.1980) embarked on several rambling photographic journeys, off the beaten path, through Italy, Scandinavia and Northern Europe — gnoseological roadtrips, you might call them, in which map and territory gave way to intuition and curiosity, a method of knowing the outer world through attentive observation and image-making. True Places Never Are reconsiders and re-sequences this decade of Di Giovanni’s medium-format photographs (initially released as three standalone photobooks), adding several previously unpublished images and framing it afresh as a single body of work in which the specifics of location and chronology are secondary to the intangible meanings and associations only the camera can suggest — for both photographer and viewer. The landscapes here seem intimate and mythic; the still lifes feel vast and open; interiors and exteriors are curiously interchangeable. And, as in Moby Dick (the source of the book’s title), a sense of water pervades — a seascape, an icecap, a bank of fog — as our protagonist restlessly chases a something — home, self, truth — that might ultimately be elusive.