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It opens in Udine, as the only stop in northern Italy, after opening its doors at the National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome in May 2022 and moving to 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 photographer, a complete 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 exhibition will be officially open to the public from Sunday 19 May, but today it raised the curtain in a special event which saw Maestro Gianni Berengo Gardin and his wife as guests of honor, together with representatives of the MAXXI of Rome and Roberto Koch , founder of Contrasto.
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 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 sudden change, an actor of profound economic, cultural and social development, which has shaped the cities of Italy and the Italians.
The words of Berengo Gardin
“It is a great pleasure to see the beautiful setting of the Castle, but above all it is a great pleasure to be in Udine, a city with which I had a close relationship when I lived in Venice. It was a return after 70 years,” commented maestro Gianni Berengo Gardin. “Photography has been my great fortune,” said the Venetian master by adoption, describing the idea of photography that he has always defended and continues to defend. “In the two million shots I have taken in my career, I have always photographed for the archive, a concept that no longer exists. I have published 265 books, some tell the story of the past and others help us understand the present, but I hope that when we are no longer here they will bear witness to what we have been”. Looking back at his photography, Berengo Gardin cannot help but thank his subjects. “The photos are taken by the subjects, not by the photographers”, he stated, finally explaining the value of black and white, which has always been his stylistic trait: “Black and white is deeper than colour. Color distracts the photographer when shooting, but especially when the photo is looked at by people. Black and white, on the other hand, shows the details, puts the faces in the foreground, illuminates the expressions, which are the most important part of reportage photography.”
The documentary photography of Berengo Gardin
“Gianni Berengo Gardin. The eye as a profession”, which MAXXI created in collaboration with Contrasto and the Civici Musei di Udine in honor of Gianni Berengo Gardin, showcases the photographer’s shots for the first time in the city of Udine, with the aim of rediscovering and reread 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, curated by Margherita Guccione of MAXXI and Alessandra Mauro of Contrasto, 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” then intends to retrace the photographer’s seventy-year career through the photographs taken in the cities that most marked his private and professional life.
The starting point of this visual tour is Venice (“The Venice of the Venetians”, as the photographer himself recalled), city where Berengo Gardin approached photography for the first time. Venice is the place where he trained professionally, thanks to his encounters with clubs such as La Gondola, and it is the place of a continuous return, from the first images of the 1950s in which an intimate and placid city can be seen to his most recent project, of 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.
There is space for reportages from 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 his needs. 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. It deals with of images of denunciation and respect, extraordinary and terrible, in the background of which the psychiatric hospital of Gorizia can also be seenwhich documented conditions within several institutions across Italy for the first time, 10 years before the Basaglia law that closed them.
The installation in the Parliament Hall
The installation inside the Parliament Hall, one of the most prestigious places of culture in the city of Udine, which finally opens up to international photography thanks to the contribution of prestigious public and private partners in our territory (from the FVG Region, to Fondazione Friuli, at the Bank of Udine and at the Center for Research and Archiving of Photography – CRAF), was designed taking up the idea of the camera. Everything opens with a viewfinder that ideally connects the Salon to the adjacent rooms, in which the exhibition continues, and with a structure that recalls the bellows of an optical bench.
The photographs, ordered in a chronological, topological but also thematic sense, bring out the fixed points of Berengo Gardin’s documentary research: the centrality of man and his position in social space; the analogue nature of his “real” photography, never retouched; the power of its narrative sequences, of the stories hidden in the spaces captured; and finally the use of photography as a historical and social document, supported however by surprising and ironic details.
To complete the exhibition, a room was entirely dedicated to the over 200 photographic publications of Maestro Berengo Gardin. In the final room, built entirely of mirrors, all the covers of the photographic books created by the master over the course of his career will be on display.
We wanted to bring the eye of Maestro Berengo Gardin, his laboratory and his lens, a filter of his profession and his life, into the rooms of the Castle Museum. Until September the Parliament Hall, a historic and fascinating space, will host an extraordinary mix between the sixteenth-century art of frescoes and the twentieth century crossed by the photography of Berengo Gardin. The idea is to bring the visitor’s eye closer to the master’s eye, bringing people into his world and way of seeing” the words of Silvia Bianco, curator of the Civic Museums.
In 1970 Cesare Colombo edited “The eye as a profession”, a book published by Contrasto dedicated to the photographs of Gianni Berengo Gardin. It is a volume designed and laid out by the author himself, a long-time friend of the photographer. The title of the exhibition and his drawing take inspiration from this book to propose a new collection of photographs by Berengo Gardin, among the most famous and little seen, which overall tell the story of decades of travel and work. The exhibition is seen as a tribute to the photographer, but also to Cesare Colombo, over fifty years after the publication of the book, and to an extraordinary period in our photographic history, when we were looking for Berengo Gardin in the front row, in the image silver salts (which is the printing technique used for the images exhibited), not the artistic composition but a living testimony of reality.
The exhibition can be visited in the Parliament Hall of the Castle Museums, but it will not be necessary to purchase an additional ticket. Visitors will simply need to purchase the entrance ticket to the Castle or the single ticket for the Civic Museums, which will also give access to the other floors of the Castle (Archaeological Museum, Museum of the Risorgimento, Gallery of Ancient Art and Friulian Museum of Photography), the exhibitions at Casa Cavazzini – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and at the Ethnographic Museum of Friuli, during the usual opening hours to the public: from Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm.
All information on the exhibition and guided tours is available on the website www.civicimuseiudine.it and on the social channels of the Civic Museums.
“Berengo Gardin talks about people, citizens, in a way that no one else does and no one else has ever done in Italy”, added Roberto Koch, founder of Contrasto. “Berengo Gardin, did not work for newspapers but for books, he had a vision in perspective, the desire to create unique objects, which are photographic publications, which otherwise would not have existed. There will be a future – he said in closing – where anyone who wants to know Italy’s past will have to see Berengo Gardin’s photographs. Italians need to see Gardin to understand where Italy has gone and where it is going today.”
