The exhibition entitled Strand – Zavattini. La fotografia è un ponte (Strand - Zavattini. Photography is a bridge) at the Central Institute for Graphics in Palazzo Poli near the Trevi Fountain, intends to show the public an important acquisition of the Institute as part of the project Strategia fotografia 2023, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, namely an important corpus of photographic works and documents, from the archive of Arturo Zavattini, attributable to the joint work of Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini.
On display are approximately 50 black and white photographs and a selection of documents, books and audiovisual contributions, which tell the story of the intense friendship and collaboration between Paul Strand (1890-1976), master of international photography and protagonist of American straight photography, on the one hand, and Cesare Zavattini (1902-1989), writer, painter, screenwriter and director, protagonist of Italian Neorealism, which led to the birth in 1955 of the photographic book Un paese (A country) (Einaudi), a pioneering project of visual sociology whose seventieth anniversary of publication will be celebrated in 2025, on the other.
At the centre of the exhibition is, Portfolio Four, a collection of ten shots taken by Strand in different places around the world, from Sicily to the Pyrenees, from France to Egypt to the Hebrides. This collection represents a synthesis of his work from 1950 to 1973, through some fundamental stages of his visual and conceptual research. Portfolio Four, in fact, considered almost an artistic testament of the great American photographer, was curated with meticulous precision by the photographer until the last days of his life and published posthumously. On display, the original prints are accompanied by texts by Hazel Kingsbury and Cesare Zavattini, as well as archive documents, such as the typescript with autographed corrections by Zavattini and the correspondence between him and the Strand Foundation.
We remember finally that the exhibition celebrates a further anniversary, the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Central Institute for Graphics, an institution that since its inception has dedicated itself to the protection, study and valorization of photography, and with the occasion recalls the exhibition Paul Strand. 58 years of photography, curated in 1976 by the then director Carlo Bertelli in the halls of the Calcografia Nazionale. The exhibition, innovative for the time and the result of a curatorial vision attentive to photography as an autonomous artistic language, also included the ten images of Portfolio Four, underlining their value within the entire creative path of the American photographer.
Photo: official poster of the exhibition
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