The exhibition

Through the works of more than 75 photographers, this unusual visual narration brings together different viewpoints, techniques, and subjects, with the explicit intention of creating a dialogue between historical and contemporary photography, generating assonances and contrasts of form and content.
A play of connections that invites the viewer to take a fresh look at familiar images - the very images that have helped to build the visual identity of Italy – and then to discern in them unexpected correspondences and suggestions.

A selection that, without claiming to summarize the complexity of Italian photography in its entirety, is in any case both a challenge and a means to explore aesthetic choices and languages that run through more than 160 years of images, including atelier photography, pictorialism, conceptualism, photojournalism, and artistic research. A journey that begins with the Alinari and the world, so vast in terms of the collections and archives represented, that formed around them – a "multiverse of images", to quote Mario Cresci, an artist who contributes a new conceptual work to this exhibition -, and arrives, by way of the great masters of 20th century photography, to the most recent artistic experimentation. The result can also be read as a brief compendium of the history of photographic techniques that starts from the calotype and arrives at virtual photography in games.

The exhibition is divided into three sections - Landscapes, Works, and Faces -, each constituting a virtual geographical, historical and artistic path that captures, in a multifaceted variety of themes, the mutations of a country in continuous evolution: North and South, city and countryside, work and leisure, tradition and innovation, social history and cultural life. Visions where the surprise lies in the "staging", in the original choices of each artist.

A proposal that is also a means of following the transformations of the country, with a language capable of grasping geographical diversity, of plumbing the depths of history and penetrating the creases of the territory. A palimpsest that makes the many "Italies" into one Italy, that speaks of shifting cultural frontiers whose complexity is owed to centuries of comparisons and contaminations; a reasoned selection which, through images captured by different gazes, comes together as a fluid and varied story whose forms reflect the mobile and vital background of a country rich in stories and memories.

Landscapes

Andrea Frazzetta, Aerial view of the volcano and the Stream of Fire, Stromboli, 2019 © Andrea Frazzetta.

Unidentified Author, Smoke spiral, Vesuvius eruption, 1906, Alinari Archives, Florence.

It is an Italy that changes that which emerges, image after image, from the stylistic choices of our artists, whereby the landscape - which in the 19th century is still that of the Grand Tour, a sublime catalogue of nature and works of art, assembled in a pioneering endeavor of "monumental unification" - is alternately shattered and reconstructed in the different aesthetic approaches of the masters of 20th-century photography.

In its extraordinary variety and discontinuity, in a territory of relatively limited scale, the Italian landscape is not just a collection of fragments. Rather, it becomes the face of a community, the image of a system in which the anthropic and natural components, both past and present, coexist in a very close relationship where the interaction between humanity and environment is what creates a sense of true belonging. It is through the intimate relationship between natural creation and man's interventions that the landscape takes on its contours, in a comprehensive whole of remarkable power and a container of values and identity.

Chapters:Spaces of natureDesigned landscapesSpaces of man

Works

Fratelli Alinari, Busts and prostheses, Ettore Gabbrielli Physiotherapy Facility, Florence, 1905, Archivi Alinari.

Alex Majoli, Young luthier, Cremona, 2011 © Alex Majoli / Contrasto

The works of man are the focus of a visual journey where the tumultuous creative evolution of Italy emerges: from the pasta factories of old to modern advances in the biomedical and aerospace sectors. The exhibition itinerary traces the passage from a world driven by the slow rhythm of the seasons, recounted by the unsurpassed black and white of 19th and 20th-century photography, to a mature industrial society, to our own automated, globalized and definitely photogenic present.

These transformations are reflected in the wider transformation of Italian society, where there remains the common denominator of an industriousness fueled by dedication, selfabnegation, imagination, and success. Italian photography recounts the creative use of the resources of the territory and the artisanal knowledge that has been able to integrate optimally with the scientific and technological progress of recent decades.

Chapters:Knowledge of the landKnowledge of the handsThe business of the Future

Faces

Carlo Mollino, Untitled, 1939, Archivi Alinari.

Stabilimento Brogi, Venus Callipyge, detail, National Archaeological Museum, Naples, 1910 ca., Alinari Archives - Brogi archive, Florence.

We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians. It is not clear whether the appeal attributed to Massimo d’Azeglio has been put into practice over the course of time. It is certainly a present and palpable idea in the history of photography, which has offered and continues to offer, in an ideal reinterpretation of the great tradition of portraiture, the faces and figures of Italians of varying epochs, regions, ages and social classes, portrayed at school, at work, and at leisure, singly and collectively, static and in motion.

In this small collection, the faces parade past in a unique and original history of the Italian social landscape, against the background of the evolution of photographic processes. The faces are transformed, always different, less and less marked by struggle and fatigue, immortalized through the use of constantly new techniques and compositions that together delineate an emotional and sentimental chronicle of an ever-changing Italy, where what really makes the difference is the unrepeatable encounter between photographer and subject.

Chapters:Figures and portraitsA century of lifeChronicles of love