Elegant, powerful, intimate, immediate: over 70 large images by Mario Testino tell in the exhibition ‘A Beautiful World’, which Palazzo Bonaparte hosts from 25 May to 25 August, the new artistic path of the photographer who moves away from fashion, genre in which he established himself as one of the greatest of his generation, to focus on the research of traditional costumes, worn with pride by the people who continue to preserve and pass on their origins.
“In my travels – explains Testino – I realized that when a country loses the link between its history and its traditional dress, something truly precious has been lost”.
The traditional costume identifies a people and brings to light their most intimate characteristics: it is a second skin that tells of their belonging to the community, the uniqueness and cultural richness of their clothing.
The over 70 images on display, the result of trips to more than 30 countries that the great master of contemporary photography has made in the last 7 years, take us across thousands of kilometres, from Cusco in Peru, where he was born, to Mexico and Colombia up to Japan and Mongolia, passing through Africa.
Testino found inspiration in the cultural identities of the countries where he had set his fashion shoots: he returned there, but with a new, different look, concentrating his art on the search for cultural uniqueness, alongside a looming tendency towards homologation, which erases identities and communities in every corner of the globe. “From the beginning of this project I felt I had to call it ‘A Beautiful World’ because I was discovering new types of beauty in places I had never looked before,” explains the photographer.
The exhibition, produced and organized by Arthemisia, is therefore an anthropological journey linked to customs among the complexities and contrasts of our multiple ways of belonging: from the Putla carnival, in the state of Oaxaca, to the Kara community in Ethiopia, from the Saharan portraits of the Tuareg of Dakhla to the typical costumes of Salvador in Brazil, up to the completely tattooed bodies in a shot taken in Yokohama.
After having immortalized cinema, jet set, music and fashion stars since the 1970s, from Kate Moss to Madonna, from Naomi Campbell to Princess Diana, Testino changes his creative code and, wherever he goes, looks for clothes and costumes original and immutable, highlighted by visual clues: the extraordinary shape of a hat or dress modeled and created for a ritual, a festival, a place or a custom. With his extraordinary images he immortalizes their places and lifestyles, including the body itself, which he defines who we are, what we belong to and what we risk losing in our ‘beautiful world’.
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