Ramak Fazel’s Milan Unit 1994-2009

A major photographic and documentary project marks the opening of the MAXXI museum’s Spazio Ghella, a gallery dedicated to contemporary photography born out of a collaboration between the museum and the Italian company Ghella, which specializes in the construction of large-scale public infrastructure projects.

Curated by Simona Antonacci with Maria Del Priori, the exhibition presents to the public for the first time the archive-work by photographer Ramak Fazel, who was born in Iran in 1965 and grew up in the United States. Acquired by MAXXI in 2025, the work is a single installation bringing together the photographer’s entire body of work produced between 1994 and 2009, during and beyond the years he spent in Milan, at the heart of the Italian design and architecture scene.

Negatives, slides, prints, publications, notes, documents and working tools make up a narrative that weaves together photography, publishing, architecture and contemporary visual culture, revealing the photographer’s working method and offering an insider’s view of a crucial period for design and for the transition from analogue to digital photography. At the center of the exhibition are themes such as what images show or hide, the passage of time that transforms them, error as a significant trace, and the conditions under which images are produced, used and circulated.

Cover: Ramak Fazel, Milan Unit (1994-2009), photo Vincenzo Labellarte