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30/11/2004

Paesaggio

Keith de Lellis Gallery, New York

Italian Landscape Photography

Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to announce Paesaggio: a multi-artist exhibition of vintage black and white Italian landscape photography.

For generations Italy’s awesome landscape has inspired and challenged photographers. Whether cold and abstract or warm and brimming with humanity, their images celebrate Italy’s geographical glory. The subjects, mostly views of the northern rural, coastal, and urban terrain, capture the landscape in every kind of light - from fields at dawn to forests of the night.

In the decades following World War II, impassioned Italian photographers devoted themselves to photographing their country. During the same era, filmmakers produced some of the most important art of the period - the neo-realist masterpieces that are the great touchstones of modern cinema. Film director Martin Scorcese’s comments on the neo-realists could equally apply to their contemporaries in photography: “desperate to redefine themselves after 20 years of fascism and the devastation of war.”

The pictures that are most reminiscent of neo-realist films are some moody urban landscapes by Mario Carrieri and Mario Finocchiaro. Their photographs embody the emotional texture in the atmosphere of a dreary, gray Milan. While Carrieri’s cold, grainy pictures reveal the isolation and melancholy of life amongst the gritty urban sprawl, Finocchiaro’s soft-focus images dreamily recollect the romance and solitude of a modern city’s industrial vistas.

Alberto Galducci, a recently rediscovered 1950s Florentine photographer, was at the forefront of contemporary theory in photography with both complex and minimalist abstractions. His highly organized pictures of Florence from the early 1950s contemplate the panorama of a world from varying perspectives. The unconventional vision that Galducci experimented with still looks fresh over 50 years later.

Mario Giacomelli’s photographs from the 1970s push the medium to its limits. Giacomelli, a visionary and one of Italy’s most important and well-recognized photographers of the 20th century, is famous for his landscape abstractions. He created powerful linear and abstract earth designs from an airplane. He was known to manipulate his pictures by altering the landscape pattern with a rented tractor, and also would occasionally draw in details on the negative. To Giacomelli, the earth was his canvas.

On exhibit are more than 48 images by 16 photographers: Antonio Amaduzzi, Giuseppe Bruno, Carlo Caligaris, Augusto Cantamessa, Mario Carrieri, Romeo Casadei, Stanislao Farri, Mario Finocchiaro, Guido Fumo, Alberto Galducci, Mario Giacomelli, Natale Gucci, Osvaldo Savoini, Tullio Stravisi, Roberto Tessaroli, and Giovanni Vanoni.

It is evident from the scope and quality of this work that Italy’s photography community was a flourishing and vital scene beginning in the mid-twentieth century. During these years, photographers consistently made interesting and technically perfect images that were both fascinating to behold and impressive for their intelligence and ingenuity. From the straight to the experimental, Italians created modern images that resonate like a distant memory.

Image: Giovanni Vanoni, La fattoria, 1955.

Keith de Lellis Gallery
47east 68th street, New York

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