Venice, 2004
© Gianni Berengo Gardini/Courtesy Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia
Udine, Castle, Parliament Hall and Ancient Art Gallery rooms
18 MAY 2024 – 15 SEPTEMBER 2024
Master of black and white, always a supporter and defender of an authentic photographic print, of an image that captures and freezes everyday life, the moments, the emotions that anticipate gestures, but also and above all the author of reportage photography and of social investigation, in almost seventy years of career Gianni Berengo Gardin, born in Santa Margherita Ligure 94 years ago, has told the story of Italy from the post-war period to today with his shots. The one described by Gardin is an Italy that is experiencing a sudden change, an actor of profound economic, cultural and social development, which has shaped the cities of Italy and the Italians.
It arrives in Udine, as the only stop in northern Italy on the path that saw it open its doors to the National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome in May 2022 and then move to Villa Pignatelli in Naples last year, the exhibition “Gianni Berengo Gardin – The eye as a profession”. In the magnificent setting of the Parliament Hall and the rooms of the Ancient Art Gallery of the Castle of Udine, 192 shots by the Ligurian photographer are displayed, an integral collection of original vintage prints from his personal archive and the Roman museum. An artisanal photography, which adds great prestige from a material point of view to the intellectual and visual value.
The documentary photography of Berengo Gardin
“Gianni Berengo Gardin. The eye as a profession” exhibits the photographer’s shots for the first time in the city of Udine, with the aim of rediscovering and rereading his very long career around Italy from a new perspective.
Berengo Gardin’s photography is a “true” photography, a practice that wants to move away from analogue or digital manipulation, and play the part of the historical document, participating and never neutral in the reality that evolves, thanks to natural compositions, with the man always at the center of a lived social space.
Berengo Gardin has built with his photographs a unique visual heritage in the history of Italian and international photography, always with an approach that he himself has always loved to define as “artisanal”. Over the decades this approach has become an exclusive trademark of the photographer, who has always loved to define himself as “a photographer-photographer”, and therefore a craftsman of art photography rather than a photographer-artist.
Time travel through Italy
The exhibition is imagined as a sort of journey, a chronological, topological and thematic journey into Berengo Gardin’s way of seeing and photographing Italy. “Gianni Berengo Gardin. The eye as a profession” therefore intends to retrace the photographer’s seventy-year career through photographs taken in the cities that most marked his private and professional life.
The starting point of this visual tour is Venice, the city where Berengo Gardin approaches photography for the first time. Even though he wasn’t born there, he feels Venetian and has said in the past: «His grandparents were Venetian, his great-grandparents were Venetian, his father was very Venetian». Venice is the place where he trained as a photographer, thanks to his encounters with photographic circles such as La Gondola, and it is the place of a continuous return, from the first images of the fifties in which an intimate and placid city can be seen to his most recent, from 2013, dedicated to Large Ships. From the Venetian lagoon we move on to the Milan of industry, workers’ struggles, intellectuals (on display, among others, the portraits of Ettore Sotsass, Gio Ponti, Ugo Mulas and Dario Fo), and we travel through almost all the regions and Italian cities, from Sicily to the Piedmontese rice fields, observed in their social, cultural and landscape transformations from the Second World War to today. And in this scenario Friuli Venezia Giulia also plays its part.
They find space in the workplaces created for Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Pirelli and, above all, Olivetti (with which he collaborated for 15 years), which lead him, during his professional life, to experience the evolutions of the working world and the needs of he. Among the shots also the Monfalcone shipyards. And finally the prints will tell the story of the psychiatric hospitals, photographed and published in 1968 in the volume “Morire di Classe”, created together with Carla Cerati. These are images of denunciation and respect, extraordinary and terrible, in the background of which the Gorizia psychiatric hospital can also be seen, which documented for the first time the conditions within various institutions throughout Italy, 10 years before the law Basaglia who had them closed.
Exhibition promoted by the Municipality of Udine, created by MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts in collaboration with Contrasto and the Civic Museums of Udine.
Edited by Margherita Guccione and Alessandra Mauro