Did you know that Giovanni Verga was also a photographer? There is an exhibition that tells about it

Giovanni Verga (Catania, 1840 - 1922) was not only a great writer and master of verismo: he was in fact also a photographer. And there is an exhibition that recounts this passion of Verga’s. In fact, on the occasion of Bergamo and Brescia Italian Capital of Culture 2023, FONDAZIONE 3M - ETS, a permanent cultural institution for research and education, presents the exhibition La segreta mania. Giovanni Verga photographer curated by Roberto Mutti: scheduled from February 12 to March 4, 2023 at the Town Hall of Seriate (BG), the project, born from the collaboration with the Culture Department of the City of Seriate and ASAV - Seriatese Visual Arts Association, intends to investigate the relationship between literature and photography and appreciate the interesting worldview of the Sicilian author in his many portraits and environmental images.The exhibition presents 90 images all from the photographic archives of the 3M Foundation: these are not original vintage images because these have been inexplicably lost, but recent prints made with careful philological research to reproduce the correct tones.

Verga photographer

Giovanni Verga was born in 1840, exactly one year after the presentation in Paris of the “fatal invention” as photography was called by astonished contemporaries. If coincidences can have a symbolic value, this one takes on a particular one because the Sicilian writer to the literary work that made him famous juxtaposed for several years - from 1878 to 1911 - his passion for photography. As one of the fathers of Verism, the close relationship between the two activities must have seemed obvious to him, a thought shared with his friends Federico De Roberto and Luigi Capuana (who was also his master in technique) and which he found in the exquisite images of Émile Zola, who was the most prestigious exponent of Naturalism. With the latter, the Catanian author shares the strange fate of being forgotten as a photographer and rediscovered only many years later.

Although, in fact, the discovery of the glass plates and rolls on which the writer had imprinted his images dates back to 1970, knowledge of his photographs is little known to the general public-a deficiency that this exhibition aims to fill.Giovanni Verga was not always technically flawless in his beginnings, something he complained to himself about, but with time he was able to improve considerably, showing effectiveness and directness in devoting himself with equal interest to landscapes as to portraits. Urban and rural Sicily is the protagonist of his visions (with obvious literary analogies with what the author himself described in his written pages), but other and more unexpected landscapes are those of the Lombard lakes, Switzerland, Bormio and its environs, which Verga had the opportunity to visit starting from Milan where he lived for a long time.

Even more extensive is the production of portraits, and it is curious to note that alongside the many relatives and friends, factors, peasants, massari, maids and a whole host of simple men and women who evidently did not only animate his novels and novellas often appear in these pictures. Sometimes they are filmed in their environment, in other cases in places, such as a small terrace of his Catania home, that the writer-photographer favored for setting up his sets, exploiting as backdrops decorated walls or a simple cloth as was the custom of the time. The postures, the clothes, the very way of shooting are now important clues for us capable of telling us a lot about the lifestyle, the aesthetics and the history of the time.

But this exhibition also wants to help us rediscover the style of a photographer in many ways still surprising today.

As part of the initiative, the conference “RECONCERNING YOUR IDEA OF THE WORLD - Culture and Photography between Bergamo and Brescia” is scheduled for Feb. 27, with a talk by Prof Roberto Mutti, also curator of the catalog that enriches the exhibition.

Did you know that Giovanni Verga was also a photographer? There is an exhibition that tells about it

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