À Rome la nuit. Photographs by Hervé Gloaguen

Promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale - Sovrintendenza Capitolina, organised by the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie (MPP) of the French Ministry of Culture, and curated by Hervé Gloaguen and Emmanuel Marguet, the exhibition hosted at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere forms part of the cultural program marking the 70th anniversary of the Rome-Paris twinning.

The exhibition features 68 photographs taken on various occasions up until the mid-1990s in Rome by Hervé Gloaguen, one of the first photographers to work in color as early as the early 1970s, when most of his colleagues were still using black and white in the tradition of the humanists. The photographer’s first encounter with the city dates back to 1975: during a trip to Italy with his wife and their baby daughter, he stopped off in Rome and parked his Volkswagen camper van at the campsite in Monte Antenne. Struck by the beauty and vitality of Rome by night and its lights, he photographed without a flash and in color, revealing exclusive vantage points and evocative scenes built up over centuries: Renaissance palaces, Baroque churches and the people of Rome with the black of night as a backdrop.

His focus is particularly on the faces and figures that fill Roman nights: young people gathered around fountains, on café terraces and in restaurants; middle-class folk, students, doormen, newlyweds, elderly aristocratic couples and tourists. Gloaguen returned to Rome in the 1980s, guided by the advice of fellow journalists and the words of Alberto Moravia, who directed him towards the EUR district, with its wide avenues and white colonnades glistening in the sun, to discover another side of the city. On his final trips in the mid-1990s, Gloaguen discovered Trastevere and its exuberance, and in a letter to his son Loïc he described this noisy, gluttonous, bustling Rome, concluding: “What I would like to capture in my photographs is something marvelous, something eternal. Perhaps the marvelous is precisely this: real life”.

Cover: Fontaine De Trevi, 1974 (c) donation Hervé Gloaguen, Ministère de la Culture (France), Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie