Venice, Inge Morath's photos dedicated to the lagoon city at Palazzo Grimani

It is a previously unseen Inge Morath that the Museum of Palazzo Grimani in Venice is showing to the public from January 18 to June 4, 2023 in the exhibition entitled Inge Morath. Photographing from Venice onwards, curated by Kurt Kaidl and Brigitte Blüml, with Valeria Finocchi, and promoted by the Veneto Regional Museums Directorate and the Suazes company, which, a few years ago, made this photographer’s career known in detail in Italy. In fact, the exhibition delves into the figure of the Austrian photographer Inge Morath (Graz, 1923 - New York, 2022) on the centenary of her birth with a previously unseen section for Italy dedicated precisely to Venice, where her career began. It was love that led newlyweds Inge Morath and Lionel Burch to Venice in November 1951. And it was bad weather in the Lagoon and Robert Capa, who made her, who was not directly familiar with photography but was already working with the famous Parisian photo agency, become the first woman photographer for the Magnum Photos Agency.

The exhibition focuses on Inge Morath’s Venice through the famous reportage that the photographer made in the Lagoon, when theMagnum Agency sent her to the city on behalf of L’Oeil, an art magazine that had chosen to accompany a reportage by the legendary Mary McCarthy with Venetian views.

At the time of her first Venetian sojourn, Morath was working at Magnum not as a photographer but as an editorial associate. She was basically in charge, in part because of her knowledge of languages, of creating captions that accompanied the images of her fellow photographers, the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, and Robert Capa.

She did not photograph, but she did not lack an eye and sensitivity. In that November, the light of Venice in the rain bewitched her, so much so that she called Robert Capa, head of Magnum, to suggest that he send a photographer who could capture the magic that was so stunning to her. Capa replied that a Magnum photographer in Venice was already there: it was her with the camera. All that was left was to buy a roll of film, load it up, and start photographing. “I was all excited,” Inge Morath would later say. “I went to the place where I wanted to take my photographs and stopped: a street corner where people were walking by in a way that seemed interesting to me. I adjusted the camera and pressed the shutter button as soon as I saw that everything was exactly as I wanted. It was like a revelation. Realizing in an instant something that had been inside me for so long, capturing it in the moment when it had taken the shape I felt was right. After that, there was no stopping me.”

In 1955, four years after those first photographs, came an assignment from L’Oeil magazine. Once in Venice, she felt the urge to explore the city, and so “for hours I walked around aimlessly, just looking, obsessed with the pure joy of seeing and discovering a place. Of course I had devoured books about Venice, about painting and what I was supposed to do. My brain was full of them.... ”.

“My greatest enjoyment was to sit at the Scuola degli Schiavoni and immerse myself in Carpaccio’s works, almost always alone. Or spending time in the company of Tiepolo, it was the end of the world. In the evening my feet were tired and even in my sleep I still found myself walking on countless bridges, the waves of the canals as if petrified.”

The exhibition as a whole brings together about 200 photographs that will have a specific and unprecedented focus on Venice also with the support of unpublished documentation. Many of these Venetian photographs, about 80 or so, have never been exhibited before in Italy.Accompanying them will be a selection of his major photographic reportages devoted to Spain, Iran, France, England-Ireland, the United States of America, China and Russia, as well as a section devoted to portraits, a very important section in the latter part of his career.

As Daniele Ferrara, regional director Museums Veneto, states, "The relationship of the Museum of Palazzo Grimani, a state institute of the Veneto Regional Museums Directorate - Ministry of Culture, with high expressions of contemporary creativity continues The concept is that of a laboratory museum, which inherits that function as a melting pot of artistic experiences carried out by the Palace between the 16th and 18th centuries. Following Archinto, a site-specific exhibition by the German master Georg Baselitz with works dialoguing with the space of the Palace and its collection, the museum welcomed the exhibition of important Italian comic artists, After the End. Narrative Architectures and New Humanities. Now the museum turns its gaze to photography, and it is a choice that also stems from the joint commitment of the Veneto Museums Department and the Central Institute for Catalogue and Documentation to the study, protection and enhancement of the photographic heritage."

Concepts that are confirmed by Valeria Finocchi, director of the Museum of Palazzo Grimani: “For some years now, the Museum has been undergoing an important process of valorization thanks to the effective public-private collaboration with prestigious entities such as the Venetian Heritage Foundation and the incessant work of building new contents and new perspectives of interpretation of its precious artistic and architectural heritage, which engage the internal staff and collaborators from historical-museological research to the design of high popularization and educational experiences. Through the refurbishment of numerous rooms on the piano nobile, including the famous Tribuna, in 2019, and the Doge’s Room, in 2021, the Palace has returned to the center of the Venetian cultural scene and now addresses differentiated audiences, in a renewed relationship with the city itself thanks to projects dedicated to the recovery of the intangible heritage of the reference territory.”

Marco Minuz of Suazes as co-organizer of the exhibition project, says, “This collaboration with the Veneto Museum Directorate and the Museum of Palazzo Grimani enhances a work we undertook a few years ago to make our country discover the figure of this extraordinary figure. Reconstructing a project by lowering it onto the work that Inge Morath dedicated to this city is the best way to celebrate her birth.”

Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; last admission 6:30 p.m. Closed Mondays. For info: https://ingemorathexhibition.com

Image: Inge Morath, Venice, 1955 ©Fotohof archiv / Inge Morath / Magnum Photos

Venice, Inge Morath's photos dedicated to the lagoon city at Palazzo Grimani

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