Yesterday in St Petersburg there opened an exhibition of Italian landscape photography organised by the Italian Cultural Institute (RU) and the CRAF Centre of Research and Archivation of Photography (IT). The exhibition is a part of the Year of Italian Language and Culture in Russia and presents to the Russians and the visitors of St Petersburg the ways the Italian photography have developed in the last 50 years, between 1950s and 2000s. On view are photographs from the CRAF, the Touring Club Italiano archives, the Galica gallery, and private collections.
Among the earliest photos there are presented the works of the after-war decade showing the documental or neorealist way in the Italian photography. The period from the 1960’s to 1980’s is marked by appearance of new themes and subjects that have a special actuality up to now. Among them there is the extermination of nature as the result of a human negligence, the negative sides of the invasion of the modern architecture and advertisement in the urban space, the incessant changes of the natural landscape. In the landscape photos of the 1990s–2000s the traditional and innovatory means of expressiveness, the realistic and abstract forms, documental exactness and the high measure of the artistic generalization are organically combined.
And a short extract from the announcement on the CRAF website:
The exhibition will range over the second half of the 20th century, highlighting the different ways of approaching the Italian landscape by the different “schools of thought to which the following artists belonged: the pictorialists such as Riccardo Peretti Griva, Silvio Maria Bujatti, Renzo Pavonello, the Studio Giacomelli of Venice and Riccardo Moncalvo; the photographers approaching Croce’s aesthetics such as Giuseppe Cavalli, Ferruccio Leiss, Federico Vender, Piergiorgio Branzi, Giuseppe Moder, Raffaele Rotondo, and even Bruno Stefani, the great landscapist of the Italian Touring Club; the artists of La Gondola such as Gianni Berengo Gardin, Elio Ciol, Lucia Sisti, Gino Bolognini, Toni Del Tin, Fulvio Roiter, Giuseppe Bruno, Giorgio Giacobbi, Sergio Del Pero, Manfredo Manfroi…; the Neorealists such as Luigi Crocenzi, Gianni Borghesan, Giuseppe Palazzi, and Pietro Donzelli; and other authors of the 1960s such as Carlo Cosulich, Uliano Lucas, Carla Cerati, Ezio Quiresi, Tullio Stravisi, Carlo Leidi, Toni Nicolini, and Ugo Mulas, who photographed Cinque Terre on behalf of Luigi Crocenzi, who had “scripted” the poetry of Eugenio Montale Meriggiar pallido e assorto… The 130 photographs of the exhibition come from the archives of the CRAF, from the Italian Turing Club, from the Circolo La Gondola of Venice, L’AM – Arte Mostre, Rome, and from private collections and from the Authors. The exhibition will be edited by Walter Liva.
The exhibition Italian Landscape in Photography will last until 23 May 2011. Considering that the Russian Museum is located a short walk from Italian Street, this may be a lovely journey into all sorts of Italian links in the Russian cultural capital.
