More than one hundred photos take us into a captivating journey, providing insights into the unique viewpoint of the world’s greatest reporters, witnesses who managed to depict history in depth through their eyes, their “open eyes”. Indeed, A occhi aperti (With open eyes), the book of Mario Calabresi (Contrasto edizioni),the pictures are now exhibited at the Royal Palace of La Venaria Reale, near Turin.
“These pictures, which shaped our collective imagination, urged me to look for their authors. I wanted to know more about the time they crossed paths with history and they managed to recognize it“, Mario Calabresi says. These authors are Abbas, Gabriele Basilico, Elliott Erwitt, Paul Fusco, Don McCullin, Steve McCurry, Josef Koudelka, Paolo Pellegrin, Sebastião Salgado and Alex Webb.
Calabresi, writer, journalist and editor-in-chief of the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa, introduces us to the exhibit through his own words in order to discover the work of the photographers he has met, their special and intense approach to reality, and their unforgettable images. Punctuated by his words, they give us the chance to look at the world from a photojournalists’ perspective.
It’s like a door opened on history, thanks to pictures and memories of witnesses who experienced and managed to catch some of the most dramatic moments of our past. ”Some pieces of history exist only because there is a picture (and a photographer) that tells about them” Calabresi says and this is one of the reasons which urged him, as a journalist, to interview these top photographers, giving us the emotive strength of these images and of their authors as journalists travelling through the second half of the twentieth century and its complexity. The photos on stage are not mere documentation of events, for they manage to convey feelings, awareness and the sense of history of those who shot them. “What would we know, what would we imagine or remember of Prague’s invasion by the Soviet Union without the images of an “anonymous photographer from Prague” whose name, we later discovered, was Josef Koudelka?
Mario Calabresi is passionate about photography, but also about journalism and reality. So he went on this special journey, looking for the “eyewitnesses” who explored the news, narrating some extraordinary moments of our time by images taken with their eyes open onto the world.
The exhibit with texts by Mario Calabresi, based on the book A occhi aperti (published by Contrasto) and curated by Alessandra Mauro and Lorenza Bravetta, is an exclusive production for the Royal Palace of La Venaria Reale; it is organized by Consorzio La Venaria Reale with Contrasto and Magnum Photo.
EXHIBITION
A occhi aperti – (With Open Eyes)
When history was caught in a photo
Abbas, Gabriele Basilico, Elliott Erwitt, Paul Fusco, Don McCullin, Steve McCurry, Josef Koudelka, Paolo Pellegrin, Sebastião Salgado, Alex Webb
Until February 8th 2015
Reggia di Venaria, Rooms of the Arts
Piazza della Repubblica 4
10078 Venaria Reale (Turin)
Italy
Tuesday to Friday: 10.00am – 6.00pm
Saturday, Sunday and holidays: 9.30am – 7.30pm.
http://www.lavenaria.it
