Ferrara, photojournalist Arianna Di Romano's work on display

Photography is back in the spotlight in Ferrara with the exhibition Oltre lo sguardo, a monographic exhibition by photojournalist Arianna Di Romano, open from Feb. 20 to June 12 at Palazzina Marfisa d’Este. The brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi and organized by the Ferrara Arte Foundation and the Art Museum Service of the City of Ferrara in collaboration with Kingford, the exhibition is a journey through the lens of Arianna Di Romano, a photographerwho is inspired by great masters such as Elliott Erwitt and Robert Doisneau for poetry and composition, Sebastião Salgado for image treatment, and Sergio Larrain and Dorothea Lange for their attention to the last.

Arianna Di Romano, Sardinian by origin but Sicilian by adoption, has immortalized faces and situations that have captured her deeply in the places where she has conducted her reportages, from the most remote villages in Southeast Asia, Romania and Poland to refugee and Roma camps in Serbia and Bosnia, from the villages of her homeland, Sardinia, to the cells of a Sicilian prison. Her sensitivity led her to focus on the “difficult” lives of the marginalized, the destitute, the homeless, street kids, gypsies, prisoners, and the elderly left alone.

The sixty photographs in the exhibition intend to invite the viewer to go “beyond the gaze,” beyond the illusory, and often misleading, appearance of the real datum, in search of a different, and authentic, beauty. “Resignation is the human condition Arianna Di Romano has most frequently recorded,” comments Vittorio Sgarbi, President of the Ferrara Arte Foundation. "Rare are the smiles on the faces portrayed by the photographer. Instead, signs, wrinkles, awe at being considered abound. Arianna has had the good fortune to portray the last, the forgotten. Those who do not even count for the chronicle of misery. She has found them in Asia, especially in Myanmar, and back home, in Roma camps. They question us, lost, in a flash of eyes: they are life in its primary, compelling condition, in the void, outside of history."

“By photographing, I dig into forgotten humanity,” Di Romano explains, “which I love and whose beauty I would like to convey. I live the feelings of the people I portray, I identify with them. I continuously look for myself in the other. What drives me to photograph is precisely to steal a look that is profound. The faces I meet I steal, because they belong to people who are never posed, they are all looks that I will almost certainly never meet again. I often can’t communicate with them. I steal those looks to give them a voice.”

For all information, you can visit the official website of the Civic Museums of Ancient Art.

Pictured: Arianna di Romano, Purity. Peoples of the Mountains, Laos (2015).

Ferrara, photojournalist Arianna Di Romano's work on display

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