EMOP Belin 2025 presents Die Blaue Brücke. Encounters above and below the Manhattan Bridge, an exhibition of 21 images by street and documentary photographer Francesca Magnani.
For over 25 years Magnani walks around city neighborhoods and progressively learns to see how people wear their feelings and expressions, at the same time exploring and deciphering her own. She walks every day – in parks, on the subways, across the bridges. With a background in classics and anthropology, she has long been interested in issues of identity and self-representation. When possible, she talks to the people she photographs: “Because I usually do not plan my portraits, each one reminds me of a specific route I walked; it marks a point in time and history and a spark of a connection that helps me feel grounded and human”.
Through her street portraits Magnani explores both the fabric of the metropolis and the relationship between personal experience and socio-political dynamics. Experiences of migration, marginalization and social exclusion shape our body language, our perception of the self and the other. The resulting images question our power structures, identity, belonging, matters of the refugee experience and the colonial gaze, and how they might all be redirected in the body as sources of empowerment, resistance and transformation. Among the people Magnani photographed are the women of the Bolivian collective ImillaSkate, who told her about the message behind the choice of wearing their colorful outfits: the empowerment of women and the importance of recognizing one’s roots as well and the meaning of skateboarding for them, “No matter how many times we fall, the important thing is to get back up” they told her. The simplicity and directness of these words transcend the boundaries of time, countries and languages and translates into the immediacy that only a photograph is capable of.
Ilaria Bonvicini wrote about Magnani’s blue bridge in Domus, the architecture and design magazine: “Though the bridge remains central, it serves as both a frame and a stage for encounters with diverse and spontaneous expressions of metropolitan life, capable of awakening imagination and challenging conventional practices of use and existence.
Through Magnani’s lens, the city’s frenetic time dissolves into the fragmented time of photography, yet the Manhattan Bridge remains an ever-changing object, different in every single frame, never static. It constantly transforms, both materially and relationally, shifting in colors and light, mirroring the unpredictable connections that cross it and the almost anthropological fascination Magnani holds for it.
Step by step, Magnani’s sensitivity uncovers the right way and moment to visually translate the stratification of this landscape without breaking it down into parts: she reveals its complexity by disrupting its surface monotony through unexpected intersections, historical and human, real and symbolic. She pictures a bridge that is not only crossed mechanically to reach the other shore, but one where life unfolds, allowing roots to grow”.
About the Photographer
Francesca Magnani is a Brooklyn-based Italian photographer, writer, teacher and translator. Born and raised in Padua, she arrived at the CUNY Graduate Center, as a Fulbright Scholar in 1997.
Since then, she has been telling in words and images the stories that move her, while she chronicles at the same time her own life. Follow her on @magnanina and francescamagnani.com.
EMOP Belin 2025
Francesca Magnani : Die Blaue Brücke
through March 28, 2025
Artspring Gallery
20 Breite Straße
Berlin Germany.
The exhibition is also available online here.
