Auteur photography at the Reggia di Colorno: monographs by Scianna and Cerati this fall

Autumn at the Reggia di Colorno is dedicated to photography: in fact, two monographic exhibitions are scheduled, curated by Sandro Parmiggiani and organized by Antea in collaboration with the Province of Parma and the Color’s Light Photography Group, and thanks to prestigious loans from the University of Parma’s Center for Studies and Archives of Communication.

The common thread of the two exhibition events will be portraits, particularly those of writers, intellectuals and theater actors.

The first, in chronological order, from September 12 to December 8, 2021, will be Ferdinando Scianna. Two Writers: Leonardo Sciascia and Jorge Louis Borges; the second, from October 16 to December 8, 2021, will be Carla Cerati. A Woman’s Look at Faces, Bodies, Landscapes.

The exhibitions are part of the Colorno Photo Life program, which aims to offer photography enthusiasts of all levels the opportunity to exhibit their works alongside those of masters and see the latest trends in national photography.

On this occasion, the Reggia opens to the public some recently restored rooms that have never so far been included in the itinerary for visiting the sumptuous residence of Marie Louise of Hapsburg-Lorraine, Duchess of Parma and Piacenza and Empress of France.

This is how Sandro Parmiggiani anticipates the contents of the two exhibitions,"Ferdinando Scianna (Bagheria, 1943), in his 44 portraits of Leonardo Sciascia and Jorge Luis Borges, delves into the faces and bodies of two writers very dear to him. If the meeting with Borges dates back to the 1980s, the one with Sciascia dates back to 1963, giving rise to such a friendship and collaboration that Scianna called the Sicilian writer ’a second father.’ It is to Sciascia that we owe one of the most lucid and intense portraits of Scianna the photographer: ’It is his photographing, almost a rapid, lightning-fast organization of reality, a catalyzing of objective reality into photographic reality: almost as if everything on which his eye rests and his lens rises obeys at that very moment, neither before nor after, by instantaneous magnetism, his feeling, his will and - ultimately - his style’"

"More extensive is the review of images by Carla Cerati (Bergamo, 1927 - Milan, 2016),“ Parmiggiani continues. ”The 88 photographs in the exhibition, all from the Cerati collection at the CSAC in Parma, which lends them for the occasion, portray people she had the opportunity to associate with: writers (Calvino, Pasolini, Marquez, Vargas Llosa, among others), artists, architects, theater people (memorable are a series of images of the Living Theatre with the typical contortions of bodies and faces). Equally significant are the black-and-white nudes of women, surprising and fascinating because one grasps how different the female gaze is on the woman’s body from the male gaze - interested, the female one, in the harmony of form and not, as is often the case with the male gaze, in the rapacity of vision that preludes a ’conquest’ - and the landscapes, especially those of the Langhe, which evoke the atmospheres of Cesare Pavese and Beppe Fenoglio and are in tune with the research on the sign in art and photography of the 1960s."

For more info: www.reggiadicolorno.it

Image: Italy, Sicily, Sant’Elia:The window on the sea (c) Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos

Auteur photography at the Reggia di Colorno: monographs by Scianna and Cerati this fall

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