The Eye as Vocation, a famous 1970 book edited by Cesare Colombo, collected an anthology of images by Gianni Berengo Gardin and testified to how relevant his personal gaze, his method and his craft were in order for him to tell his times through images. The exhibition chooses that same title in proposing a new visual storytelling by Berengo Gardin on Italy, composed of nearly 200 photographs, some famous, others little-known, others yet unpublished, and many vintage prints made by the author himself.
A master of black and white, in the almost seventy years of his career Berengo Gardin built a unique visual heritage of Italy from the post-war period to today, characterized by a great coherence in language choices and by an “artisanal” approach to the photographic practice.
The exhibition itinerary develops as a continuous narrative sequence in which the through line is made up by the peculiar aspects of Berengo Gardin’s visual research: the consistency of his way of looking at reality, capable of creating references and resonances that go beyond the subject and the specific time; the narrative - and not merely descriptive – approach found in his photographs; the commitment to an idea of photography as documentation, but also containing disorienting details and irony.
The starting point of this journey is Venice, which the author has been portraying since the 1950s and which is the place he always returns to, as with the Big Ships project in 2013. Visitors will be passing through all the Italian regions and cities, with their social, cultural and landscape transformations dating from the post-war period to today. The images on display portray work places, everyday life places, and health care spaces (Morire di classe, 1968), construction sites (such as that of MAXXI, photographed in 2007), but also the author’s many encounters with key figures of contemporary culture.
Two places of visual production that were dear to Berengo Gardin mark the beginning and end of the itinerary: the studio space, a place of reflection and elaboration, and the space of books, that are the favourite destination of his work, with over 250 publications over the past seventy years.