Extraordinary edition: an exhibition in Milan showcases 20th century Italy in the shots of Mario De Biasi

A visual essay on the work of Mario De Biasi (Belluno, 1923 - Milan, 2013), versatile photographer, defined by Enzo Biagi as “the man who could photograph everything.” And in this everything he favored the Lombard capital, where he moved when he was 15. So one hundred years after his birth, the Diocesan Museum in Milan is dedicating to him-from Nov. 14, 2023 to Jan. 21, 2024-anExtraordinary Edition that brings together a series of iconic shots dedicated to his adopted city.

The exhibition MARIO DE BIASI AND MILAN. Edizione Straordinaria, organized and produced by Mondadori Portfolio in collaboration with the Diocesan Museum of Milan and curated by Maria Vittoria Baravelli with Silvia De Biasi, presents 70 vintage photographs, specimens and unpublished shots by one of the most appreciated authors of the second half of the Italian twentieth century, who for thirty years documented the history of our country through the pages of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore’s periodical, Epoca.

The exhibition - consisting of works from the Mondadori Archives and the De Biasi Archives - will allow the public to learn about the personal language that the photographer adapted to very different contexts. And, in particular, to Milan.

“The Duomo, the city, the people and the fashion, without order or punctuation,” says Maria Vittoria Baravelli, "Milan is backdrop and base camp, the place of an endless dance from which De Biasi leaves to always return, dedicated to immortalizing from the Galleria to the Navigli, to the suburbs, a city that in the 1950s and 1960s became a mirror of thatItaly that became famous throughout the world."

A gaze at once lucid and evocative, that of De Biasi, capable of recounting with immediacy and originality a controversial moment in the history of Italy. Indeed, in the neat plots of his shots one can read the historical and cultural changes of the country, which in the 1950s and 1960s was settling on a renewed cultural identity. Rebirth that in Milan found synthesis and in De Biasi’s shots eloquent expression.

The exhibition winds its way ideally through the city, from its nerve center to the suburbs. There are the tourists looking out from the roof of the Duomo and crowding the bars of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, but also the commuters at the Porta Romana train station. And then San Babila, theArco della Pace, glimpses of a now impossible Milan where barges go up the Navigli and everyone marvels at the changing world.

De Biasi’s authorial approach was enriched with journalistic acumen in 1953, when he was hired as a photojournalist by Epoca. An iconic magazine of the time, designed on the model of illustrated U.S. periodicals, which included Aldo Palazzeschi and Cesare Zavattini, among others.

In a publication distinguished by its refined graphic layout, according to editor Enzo Biagi, De Biasi was the only one who could always guarantee the newspaper “the right picture,” even if he had to risk his life among bullets and shrapnel to earn it, in the many war reports of his career. Or confront the great personalities of the time among intellectuals, actresses and artists.

Totally unpublished are the auditions of Moira Orfei acrobat and the frames that precede and follow the famous shot Gli Italiani si voltano, made in 1954 for the weekly photostory magazine Bolero Film, which Germano Celant chose to open the exhibition Metamorphosis of Italy, organized in 1994 at the Guggenheim in New York. The image captures a group of men observing Moira Orfei, framed from behind and dressed in white as she strolls through downtown Milan.

The exhibition closes with a section of photographs that De Biasi took on his non-European travels: fromIndia to the Budapest Revolution, from Japan to Siberia, and on to the moon landing with the famous shots of Neil Armstrong.

Mario De Biasi(Sois, Belluno 1923 - Milan 2013) moved to Milan at age 15 where he became a radio technician. During the German occupation he was sent to work in Nuremberg, where he found a photography manual by chance and learned photography as a self-taught photographer. Back in Italy in 1946 he worked at Magneti Marelli in Sesto San Giovanni, and in 1953 he was hired as a photojournalist by Arnoldo Mondadori’s periodical Epoca, with which he worked until 1983. During this thirty-year period he produced more than one hundred and thirty covers and unforgettable reportages from Italy and around the world: in South America, Hong Kong, Singapore, MountEtna, and Africa. Some reports remain famous, such as the one in Hungary during the 1956 uprising and the one of the expedition with Walter Bonatti to Siberia in 1964. He is also highly appreciated for his portraits “in shirtsleeves” to the protagonists of the time such as, to name a few, Aristotle Onassis, Ray Sugar Robinson, Andy Warhol, Marlene Dietrich, Brigitte Bardot.

He published over a hundred books and received numerous international awards.

In 1982 he received the Saint Vincent prize for journalism, and in 2003 he was awarded the title of “Master of Italian Photography” by the FIAF (Italian Federation of Photographic Associations). The Municipality of Milan recognizes his activity by awarding him the Ambrogino d’oro in 2006 and, after his death in 2013, by inscribing his name in the Famedio of Milan’s Monumental Cemetery on a plaque dedicated to “distinguished, meritorious citizens, distinguished in the history of their country.”

For all information, you can visit the official website of the Carlo Maria Martini Diocesan Museum.

Pictured: Mario De Biasi, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan, 1950s © Mario De Biasi for Mondadori Portfolio

Extraordinary edition: an exhibition in Milan showcases 20th century Italy in the shots of Mario De Biasi

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