The Gallerie d’Italia in Milan is dedicating an exhibition to the photographer and publisher Enzo Sellerio (1924-2012) on the centenary of his birth. Entitled Enzo Sellerio. A Little Sicilian Anthology, it offers an in-depth look at the work and figure of one of the most interesting Italian intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century.
An influential voice of Sicilian culture and a reference for many other photographers, artists, scholars and writers, he broke the traditional visual stereotypes of Sicilian society and culture, revealing instead its more realistic, symbolic and contradictory aspects. The result can also be seen in this exhibition, which unveils a small anthology of fragments of lives, places and behaviours, observed with a free gaze, nourished by the history of art and cinema, combining irony and sweetness, with an accent of melancholy.
Nevertheless, Sellerio looked for the positive side of a culture that has often been violently crossed by a multitude of events, highlighting the resilience of Sicilians, representing pietas, not misery. And, as Olivia Sellerio explains, “in his father’s photographs there was a love of stories and of sharing them”. It is no accident that he has been referred to as “a writer for images.”
The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Archivio Enzo Sellerio and curated by Monica Maffioli and Roberta Valtorta, features 85 photographs, vintage prints as well as prints from unpublished negatives selected on the occasion of the centenary from the still partly unexplored archive. It is an opportunity to better understand “the sense of photography” of one of the protagonists of the season of Italian reportage intertwined with neorealism, close in narrative and synthesis to French humanist photography.
Enzo Sellerio, founder with his wife Elvira Giorgianni of the well-known publishing house, designed and edited art and photography books, and created the graphics for all the series, including, the famous Blue series. He was a rigorous and ironic experimenter and a refined interpreter of his time thanks to photography, which he practised from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, but also a collector of “scattered things,” especially Sicilian, but not only, which “helped him” to create thoughts and stories.
The exhibition presents the fundamental nuclei of his work, created over twenty years of activity: from the first reportage, Borgo di Dio published in 1955 in the magazine “Cinema Nuovo,” central in the sphere of Italian neorealist photography, to the photographs taken in Palermo and in particular those commissioned from him by the Swiss magazine du in 1961 to the portraits of artists, intellectuals and actors from the world of entertainment who contributed to the Palermo’s cultural season of the second half of the 20th century. Among them, for example: Arthur Miller, Christo, Robert Rauschenberg, Vittorio Gassman, Claudia Cardinale, Giacomo Manzù and Leonardo Sciascia.
A law graduate, he was attracted by the discovery of photography as a medium of information, social denunciation and poetic narrative. And he began to approach photography professionally.
At the height of the spread of the illustrated press, he began to collaborate with Pannunzio’s Il Mondo and Longanesi’s Il Borghese, with Pirelli and Panorama. His reportages have been published by the most important international magazines, including Life, du, The Times, Fortune, Vogue France and Vogue America. First solo exhibitions: at the Obelisco in Rome, at the Bussola in Turin and the Milan Triennale in the late 1950s.
In his photography, one can perceive both his education and an approach that would mark all his work, his relationship with violence and savagery. His style, according to the writer and journalist Vincenzo Consolo, “is based on the difficult balance between the word and the thing, between meaning and signifier, between information and expression; between history and poetry. There is no violence, there is no lupara. But there is the human, the all-too-human. There is love, pietas, for all the creatures portrayed”.
Alongside his photojournalistic work, he has also done documentary work, like the compilation of a complete illustrated survey of the mosaic decorations in the Cathedral of Monreale.
Paola Sammartano
Enzo Sellerio. Piccola Antologia Siciliana
From February 26 to April 13, 2025
Gallerie d’Italia – Milano, Museo di Intesa Sanpaolo
Piazza della Scala, 6
20121 Milan
Italy
https://gallerieditalia.com/it/milano/
