Milano, Ritratto In Movimento
Milan, A Portrait In Movement.
The Changing Metropolis.
Forma, The International Centre for Photography
Dec 2007 – Jan 2008
The tale of a century of city life from photographic archives
Milan and its citizens play the lead role in this exhibition curated by Denis Curti: a trip through time, taking us from the black & white Milan of the end of the nineteenth century to today’s expressive, contemporary metropolis. The project draws on material from four different photographic archives.
First and foremost is the archive of AEM, the historical electricity city company. Images by Gabriele Basilico, Olivo Barbieri, Luigi Ghirri, Joel Meyerowitz, and Martin Parr interpret milanesità (the quality of being Milanese) as a metropolitan identity, giving their own personal viewpoint of the adjective, according to how they see the city.
The Contrasto archive matches the sensitivity of famous names in photography with other younger artists in a sequence of photographs by authors such as Giancolombo, Federico Garolla, Gianni Berengo Gardin and Daniele Dainelli.
Suggestive urban atmospheres are captured in images from the archives of the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera: instant and engaging shots of a black & white Milan that seems so far from us and yet so familiar in these photographs from the chronicles of the newspaper’s historical archive, conserved at the Corriere della Sera Foundation.
The exhibition is articulated therefore in four sections, one for each archive, tracing its narrative course which, without seeking a chronological order, investigates the daily life of Milan past and present.
