For several years I received an free invitation to attend the annual Lucie Awards, US-based photography awards based on the Oscars and almost as ludicrous and self-congratulatory. I never went, mainly because a Travelcard can’t get you to New York. And as I wrote last year, Who Needs Oscars?
This year the sixth Lucie awards were presented on October 20, with the top award, for Lifetime Achievement going to the Italian photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin.
Gardin, born in 1930, started taking pictures in 1954 and has been awarded most of the major photography prizes, published around 200 books of photographs, had around 200 shows around the world (including at Arles and in Paris, New York…) He has pictures in museums around the world, his work has been in leading books and shows but is almost totally unknown in the UK. He’s a photographer very much in the mould of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Willy Ronis, but who remained working in that mode into the 2000s.
Y0u can read more about him at PhotoCentral (more pictures) and at Photostream there is “half a review” of his 2005 retrospective book and half a discussion of why he is not better known here.