An exhibition in Milan on Giovanni Chiaramonte, among Italy's greatest photographers

From Nov. 16, 2024 to Feb. 9, 2025, the Diocesan Museum in Milan will dedicate an exhibition to Giovanni Chiaramonte (Varese, 1948 - Milan, 2023), among Italy’s greatest photographers. In his photographic career, Chiaramonte contributed others to the poetic-conceptual redefinition of the contemporary landscape image. The exhibition titled Infinite Realism is curated by Corrado Benigni with the Fondazione Banca Popolare di Milano and Fondazione Fiera Milano, celebrates the artist one year after his death on Oct. 18, 2023. The exhibition presents 40 images divided into three sections consisting of Italy, Europe, Americas that trace more than two decades of research around different ways of perceiving landscape and urban views, which have always been at the center of the photographer’s artistic journey.

The route, which starts in Italy, unfolds along key points of landscape, history and Western identity that bears the marks of a long stratification of cultures and customs. The route touches Athens, Rome, Berlin and reaches as far as the Bosphorus and Jerusalem. The journey, which continues with the United States and Central America, aims to trace the development of the West’s path, which remains tied to tradition but is at the same time projected into a different future. The title, Infinite Realism, refers both to the horizon line, a central element of landscape photography, but also to the many possibilities of interpreting the scenery. The exhibition is complemented by a tribute to Giovanni Chiaramonte’s contribution to the production of the 2011 Ambrosian Gospel Book, for which the Diocese of Milan commissioned some shots from the master, which are presented in a dedicated section.

“His art, which has always been linked to an existential and spiritual exploration, is a layered ’text’ that narrates the long and difficult journey within the images to construct a discourse that goes beyond the dimension of telling the story of the world, revealing rather the fundamentals of human seeing...,” Corrado Benigni writes in the text of the book accompanying the exhibition. “Chiaramonte knows well that there is no harmony in the world, no totalitỳ, no fulfillment. His is not a consolatory photograph. The ultimate resistance,” he suggests, “is only that of the image, which by showing things makes them exist in a new light, as the word does by naming them.”

Notes on the artist

Giovanni Chiaramonte (Varese, 1948 - Milan, 2023) began photographing in the late 1960s, working for the revival of the figurative form, which followed the great abstract and informal season of certain trends in Pop Art and Conceptual Art. Chiaramonte’s imagery is generated from the beginning in the theological and aesthetic tradition of H. U. von Balthasar and the Eastern Church, encountered in P. Evdokimov, O. Clément, A. Tarkovsky, and has as its main theme the relationship between place and destiny in Western civilization. He founded and edited photography series for Jaca Book 1980-89, Federico Motta Editore 1990-93, S.E.I. 1994-97, Edizioni della Meridiana 1998-2005, Ultreya 2005-2017. For his 20-year collaboration with national and international journals and institutions, the University of Palermo awarded him an honorary degree in Architecture in 2005. In 2006, Prof. Italo Zannier awarded him the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Prize for Photography. In 2010 he is featured at the Shanghai Expo with the work Hidden in Perspective. He has taught History and Theory of Photography at IULM in Milan, at the Faculty of Architecture in Palermo and at the Master of “Forma” in Milan.

An exhibition in Milan on Giovanni Chiaramonte, among Italy's greatest photographers

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