200 x 200: due secoli di fotografia e società
Berenice Abbott, Waterfront, South Street, from Changing New York, 1935, The New York Public Library Digital Collections
Aldrin in piedi accanto al ML, immagine Hasselblad dell'Apollo 11 dal rullino 40/S, 20 luglio 1969. Archivio del Progetto Apollo/ Aldrin stands beside LM, Apollo 11 Hasselblad image from film magazine 40/S, 20 July 1969. Project Apollo Archive
Prima immagine condivisa con un cellulare. In foto la neonata Sophie, figlia dell'informatico Philippe Kahn, inviata l'11 giugno 1997 da un ospedale di Santa Cruz, California. Kahn utilizzò un prototipo rudimentale composto da una fotocamera digitale collegata a un telefono Motorola StarTAC / The first image shared with a mobile phone. The photo, taken on 11 June 1997, shows newborn Sophie, daughter of computer scientist Philippe Kahn, and was sent from a hospital in Santa Cruz, California. Kahn used a basic prototype consisting of a digital camera connected to a Motorola StarTAC phone
200×200. Due secoli di fotografia e società (Two Hundred Years of Photography and Society)
Curated by Walter Guadagnini.
The exhibition aims to be both a tribute to the history of photography and an opportunity to reflect on the presence of its language in society from the mid-19th century to the present day, starting with the historic image produced by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 that is considered the earliest surviving example of a photograph.
The exhibition does not claim to offer an impossible history of photography in bite-sized pieces, nor to be a precious collection of masterpieces, but instead intends to shed light on the importance of photography in defining society and the collective imagination of the last two centuries, as well as the mechanisms of its dissemination around the world.
Curated by Walter Guadagnini – photographic historian, teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and long-standing artistic director of the Fotografia Europea festival – the exhibition has been constructed through photography from public and private collections in Italy. It also exhibits images reproduced in newspapers, magazines and posters, through displays of books and films, as well as devices that span from the earliest cameras to modern-day smartphones. Finally, the exhibition also includes a number of photographs from the “public domain”, precisely to highlight photography’s extraordinary capacity to be a reproducible language, which, thanks to this characteristic, became the most important language of the 20th century and, still today, plays a central role in the world of communications and figurative arts.
Not necessarily masterpieces taken by great photographers – even if many are included in the show, from Louis Daguerre to the Fratelli Alinari, from Julia Margaret Cameron to Eadweard Muybridge, from Man Ray to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, and leading figures in contemporary photography around the world – but images that have had, and still have, a particular significance to the history of humanity over the last two centuries, for different reasons.
As well as showcasing the unusual spaces of Palazzo Scaruffi, the staging will respond to the evolution of photographic language, taking the viewer back to specific moments that have marked the history of photography and the world, in a continuous and fascinating journey to discover photography’s endless different characteristics.
