Villa Pignatelli hosts Gianni Berengo Gardin's first solo exhibition in Naples

Villa Pignatelli hosts from April 6 to July 9, 2023 the first solo exhibition in Naples of Gianni Berengo Gardin (Santa Margherita Ligure, 1930). It is the exhibition entitled Gianni Berengo Gardin. L’occhio come mestiere, curated by Margherita Guccione, Alessandra Mauro and Marta Ragozzino, promoted by the Campania Regional Museums Directorate and produced by MAXXI, in collaboration with Contrasto, Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia and Archivio Gianni Berengo Gardin. In the new installation at Villa Pignatelli - House of Photography, the exhibition already presented at MAXXI in Rome in 2022 is enriched with a new nucleus of photographs dedicated to Naples and the Campania region.

Gathered together more than two hundred photographs including famous images, others little known or completely unpublished. An extraordinary narrative dedicated to Italy, which takes up the title of the famous 1970 book edited by Cesare Colombo, L’occhio come mestiere, ananthology of images by the master that testified to the importance of his gaze, his method and his uncommon ability to narrate his time.

A master of black and white, reportage photography and social investigation, in almost seventy years of his career Gianni Berengo Gardin has told the story of Italy from the postwar period to the present with his images, building a unique visual heritage characterized by a great consistency in linguistic choices and a “craft” approach to photographic practice.

The exhibition is introduced by a section devoted to the studio in Milan, for Berengo Gardin a place of reflection and elaboration, which appears as a sort of chamber of wonders in which private and lesser-known aspects of his personality also emerge.

The exhibition continues through a fluid and non-chronological itinerary that accompanies the visitor on a journey through the master’s world and way of seeing, offering a reflection on the peculiar characters of his research. Among them: the centrality of man and his place in social space; the concretely but also poetically analog nature of his “true photography” (a formula with which he stamps his autograph prints that have never been manipulated and refers to the photographer’s work as a “craftsman”); the power and specificity of his way of constructing the narrative sequence, which is not limited to simple descriptions of space but naturally builds stories; the committed adherence to a conception of photography understood as a document, yet punctuated by unsettling and ironic details. And, over all, the consistency of his vision.

The starting point of this visual journey is Venice, a city of choice for Berengo Gardin who, although he was not born there, feels Venetian. Venice is the place where he is formed as a photographer, thanks to his meeting with photographic circles such as La Gondola, and it is the place of a continuous return, from the first extraordinary images of the 1950s in which we see an intimate and almost whispered city, very poetic, passing through the protest at the 1968 Biennale to the famous project dedicated to the Great Ships in 2013. From Venice to the Milan of industry, of workers’ struggles, of intellectuals (on display, among others, portraits of Ettore Sotsass, Gio Ponti, Ugo Mulas, Dario Fo), to then cross almost all Italian regions and cities, from Sicily to the rice fields of the Vercelli area, observed in their social, cultural and landscape transformations from the post-World War II period to the present. And then the famous reportages from the workplaces made for Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Pirelli and, above all, Olivetti (with whom he collaborated for 15 years), which helped him create a social conscience and, as he says in the interview with Margherita Guccione made for the exhibition at MAXXI: “I can call myself a communist outside the lines, not so much because I read the important texts on communism, but because I worked in the factory with the workers, I understood their problems.” Those on psychiatric hospitals published in 1968 in the volume Morire di classe (Dying in Class), produced together with Carla Cerati: images of denunciation and respect, extraordinary and terrible, documenting for the first time the conditions inside psychiatric hospitals in various institutions throughout Italy. Edited by Franco Basaglia and Franca Ongaro Basaglia, the book was instrumental in establishing the movement of opinion that led in 1978 to the approval of Law 180 to close asylums. The images on display then tell the story of the Roma people and culture, whose intimate and choral moments of their lives, such as festivals and ceremonies; the many small rural villages and big cities; and the places of everyday life, Berengo Gardin photographed with confidence and curiosity; earthquake-stricken L’Aquila; construction sites (including that of the MAXXI, photographed in 2007); and the author’s many encounters with key figures in contemporary culture (Dino Buzzati, Peggy Guggenheim, Luigi Nono, Mario Soldati, to name a few).

To Naples and the Campania region, from Capri to Pompeii, is dedicated the nucleus of photographs that enriches the exhibition at Villa Pignatelli, a tribute to the Neapolitan city in the prestigious venue that since 2010, in the spaces of the House of Photography, has dedicated international exhibitions to recognized interpreters of contemporary photography and events on themes and languages of photographic art. Through Berengo Gardin’s eye, glimpses of the historic center, from alleys to monuments and city squares, alternate with views of Campania’s most famous landscapes, in a personal and evocative tale that takes place between the late 1960s and 1990s.

The itinerary is completed by a section devoted to books, the main and favorite destination of his work, a sort of bookcase, representative of the more than 250 publications he has produced during his long career, collaborating with authors such as Gabriele Basilico, Luciano D’Alessandro, Ferdinando Scianna, Renzo Piano and also with Touring Club Italiano and De Agostini. Also crucial was his collaboration with Mario Pannunzio’s weekly Il Mondo, where he published more than 260 photographs between 1954 and 1965, and about which he wrote, “In my life I met many important Italian intellectuals who became friends and influenced my photography very much. The most important was Mario Pannunzio.”

Through the scanning of a QR code, it is also possible to visit the exhibition accompanied by the voice of Gianni Berengo Gardin, who tells firsthand anecdotes and memories related to his personal and professional life, in the podcast dedicated to the photographer and produced by MAXXI.

The exhibition is accompanied by the book L’occhio come mestiere, published by Contrasto on the occasion of the exhibition at MAXXI in Rome.

The work and archive of Gianni Berengo Gardin are represented exclusively by Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia.

Villa Pignatelli hosts Gianni Berengo Gardin's first solo exhibition in Naples

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