Adolfo Porry-Pastorel. L’altro sguardo. Nascita del fotogiornalismo in Italia

That news stories can be told through images more than text is something we are used to. But when and how did this practice begin in Italy? The Museum of Rome at Palazzo Braschi hosts the first major solo exhibition dedicated to the father of Italian photojournalists, a pioneer in political and social documentary photography that has not yet had the attention and weight his work and his influence deserve.

Together with archival footage, original prints, unpublished documents and personal objects, the over 80 shots in the exhibition illustrate the life, the art, the relationships and the different passions of Adolfo Porry-Pastorel, a daring experimenter of printing techniques and transmission of images, and of cunning stratagems to get a scoop. Photographer, journalist, reporter, from the 1910s to the 1940s, with his camera and at the head of his agency VEDO, he managed to be everywhere, giving life, with the images sent to newspapers and magazines, to an unprecedented and surprising story of Italy.

Agile, intuitive, visionary, without genre fences, Pastorel is an extraordinary narrator of his and our time. His photos, some of which are more than one hundred years old, are extraordinarily vivid and up to date. Eccentric, brilliant, interesting, they incredibly correspond to what we are looking for from globalized information today: speed, vision, incisiveness.