The New York Times Lens blog (again) has a nice piece on Italian photography after the Second World War, Italy’s Independence in Postwar Photography, written by Rena Silverman. This is based on and features a set of photographs from ‘Mid-Century Postwar Italian Photography‘ showing at the gallery web site, but not, so far as I could see any text about the show, so Silverman’s article is very welcome.
The photography is very much the equivalent of something far better known abroad at the time – and still now – the ‘Neorealism’ of Visconti, Zavattini, Rossellini, De Sica and others, but I have to admit that very few of the photographers in the show are familiar to me, though some of the images I’ve seen before.
Perhaps the best-known of the photographers is Gianni Berengo Gardin, who received the Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008, and an exhibition of his work is currently on show in London, at Prahad Bubbar until May 23, 2014. The Daily Telegraph has a feature The Sense of a Moment: Gianni Berengo Gardin with a gallery of 10 photographs, Gianni Berengo Gardin: Italy’s greatest photographer. Perhaps not, and there are certainly others who could lay claim to that accolade, but certainly some work of interest. Although Wikipedia is hardly a definitive source, Gardin doesn’t event make it to their list of Italian photographers, though there are quite a few names familiar to me there, including that of Gina Lollobrigida!