Gianni Berengo Gardin, Roma

From the very start of his long career, which began in the mid-fifties, Gianni Berengo Gardin’s camera has described above all Italy, showing it in all its multiple aspects and capturing its culture, with an explicit desire for documentation, which he considers the DNA of photography.

As mosaic tiles, his images do not only seize the moment but tell also true stories, observing the flow of life and revealing the continuous evolution of the Italian society.

Often portrayed with the usual attentive look and calm precision, the capital of Italy is at the center of the new exhibition dedicated to the photographer and hosted in the Casale di Santa Maria Nova, one of the treasures of the Appia Antica. Simple and powerful, rigorous in the play of geometry and chiaroscuro, the snapshots show the story, the sublime beauty, the contradictions and scars of Rome from the second post-war to the present day in a careful and never banal way.

With humanity, tenderness, melancholy and profound poetry, the lens of his camera capture details, gestures and glances: concrete and real images immortalized on film that depict in 75 shots, including many unpublished ones, day-to-day reality, revealing the charm of the city and that typical cynical and amused fatalism and brazen frankness that distinguish Romans. A journey full of emotion across people, historical monuments and suburbs, without filters and judgments, to know, understand, pass the baton.

Photo: Electa - "Roma, 1973" © Gianni Berengo Gardin - Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia Milano