Gianni Berengo Gardin

Initial sources and quotes

Follow up

• [1]
• [2]

Life

• Born in Liguria, Italy, 1930.
• "born in 1930 in Santa Margherita Ligure near Portofino"
• Liven in Milan since 1975.
• First sold work in 1972.
• "His first photographic reports were published in 1954 in Il Mondo, edited by Mario Pannunzio, with whom he collaborated until 1965."

Training

• "Self-taught. Spent two years in Paris working with photographers, learning the art from them."

Influences

• "Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau."

Employment

• Great Britain, Touring Club (automotive), 1978.
• His archive contains >1.5M negatives.
• "Now in his 84th year, he has spent more than half a century documenting Italian mores, from Olivetti factory workers to Sicilian gypsies and the protests of 1968. In the 1970s, when he turned his Leica on the inmates of psychiatric institutions, his testimony of cruelty led to more humane legislation."
• "One of his most recent assignments, from La Repubblica newspaper, was to photograph the giant cruise ships that are threatening the city’s social and environmental balance."
• "commissions from Olivetti and Fiat"
• The FORMA Foundation will be managing his archive, including negatives, prints, documents and cameras.
• Has worked with periodicals "Domus, Epoca, Le Figaro, L'Espresso, Time, Stern"
• "He collaborated with the most important Italian businesses (Olivetti, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Italsider, etc.), rarely to photograph their products but rather to document the worklife of their employees."
• "reporter in 1954 for Il Mondo"
• "In 1962, he finally decided to dedicate himself exclusively to photography"
• "after settling in Milan in 1965, he started collaborating with a number of other national and international magazines, ranging from Epoca and Domus to Time and Stern."
• "In the early 1990s, Berengo Gardin lived for some time with three different groups of gypsies, portraying their way of living free of the prejudices usually associated with this minority. Two award-winning books arose from the projects: Zingari a Firenze and Zingari a Palermo."
• "Another important part of his production is his architectural and landscape photography. He has long collaborated with the Italian Touring Club and the Istituto Geografico DeAgostini to investigate the transformations of the Italian and European landscape. He has also photographed many of archistar Renzo Piano‘s projects."
• "Between 1966 and 1983 he worked with Touring Club Italiano, for whom he produced a number of volumes on Italy and other European countries, and with the Istituto Geografico De Agostini."
• "He worked closely alongside the industrial world (Olivetti, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, IBM, Italsider etc.), compiling reports and company monographs."
• "In 1979 he started to work with Renzo Piano, and recorded the progress of his architectural projects."
• "Since 1990 he has been represented by Contrasto."

On the photograph Vaporetto, Venice, 1960

• "[It's] in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a print sold at Christie's for €38,000."
• " Henri Cartier-Bresson included this shot in his list of the 100 most important photographs of all time."
• "It was a matter of pure luck, really. I was doing a lot of architectural photography, and this was a spontaneous shot: I only took one picture. In the centre there is a reflection in the glass door of the vaporetto, behind which stands a man all dressed in black. If he'd been wearing white, the shot wouldn't have worked."
• "I was 30, living on the Lido in Venice, and every morning I took the vaporetto, or water bus, across to where I worked in San Marco."
• "I made a book on Venice called Venise des Saisons [1965], in French because it was published in Switzerland. They are photographs indirectly about Venice. They are more about the Venetians, the people who live there. This and the following photograph are from that book."
• "In 2003, Henri Cartier-Bresson was curator of an exhibition, 'Les Choix d'Henri Cartier-Bresson', for his newly inaugurated Paris Foundation. This presented a variety of works that resonated for him, by a range of international artists. Gianni Berengo Gardin's 'Vaporetto' was among the images included."
• "gelatin silver print, signed in pencil, photographer's copyright credit stamp and further annotations in pencil (verso), image 10 x 13¼in. (26.1 x 33.7cm.),sheet 16 x 12¼in. (31.1 x 40.6cm.)" sold for $36,718 on June 12, 2012.

Morire di classe

• "Two reportages are usually mentioned when talking about Gianni Berengo Gardin. In 1968, psychiatrist Franco Basaglia asked photographer Carla Cerati to document the terrible conditions in which people in Italian asylums lived. Cerati felt the task would be too complex to carry out alone, so she asked Berengo Gardin to participate. The next year, a book of their images, Morire di classe, was published. It was the first book ever published worldwide to show the cruelties perpetrated against psychiatric patients. Ten years later, Italian asylums were closed by law."

• In the late 1960s a movement to reform psychiatric care began in Italy. The three primary artistic works to come out of these efforts were the 1969 book L'istituzione negata. Rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico (The negated institution. Report from a psychiatric hospital), the 1969 documentary I giardini di Abele (The Gardens of Abel) and Gardin's 1969 Morire di classe. La condizione manicomiale fotofrafata da Carla Cerati e Gianni Berengo Gardin (Dying of class: the condition of asylums photographed by Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin). The historian David Forgacs characterizes Morire di classe as "in effect the photographic supplement to L'istituzione negata and I giardini di Abele."

Books

• 1965 Venise des Saisons (Contains Vaporetto, in French, published in Switzerland)
• Morire di Classe "One of his most important books"
• "Of his 250 published books, only 10 are in colour."
• India of the Villages forms the 2014 Cork Street gallery show
• "Books such as Dentro le case and Dentro il lavoro are some of the best journalistic records of how people worked and lived in post-WWII Italy."

Exhibitions

• "Our interview has been prompted by a forthcoming display in London at Prahlad Bubbar’s Cork Street gallery, which is better known for exhibiting Indian miniature paintings. It is the first time Berengo Gardin has shown in Britain since 1975, when Bill Brandt included him in his seminal landscape show at the Victoria and Albert Museum."
• "‘The Sense of a Moment: Gianni Berengo Gardin’, Prahlad Bubbar Gallery, London, April 11-May 23, prahladbubbar.com"
• 2005 Piazza Lucretius
• 2014 Mostri a Venezia (Monsters of Venice), Milan, Villa Necchi, concerning the problems of large cruise ships in Venice.
• From Christie's auction house

1. Architectural Association, London, 1961;
2. Le Guide du Livre, Lausanne, 1965;
3. Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, 1987;
4. Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles, 1987;
5. Refettorio delle Stelline, Milan, 1988;
6. Muse de l'Elysee, Lausanne, 1991;
7. Fotografi italiani, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, 1993;
8. Gianni Berengo Gardin, Maison Robert Doisneau, Paris, 1997; Museo civico del Santo, Padova, 2001; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2001; Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia, 2002; Auditorium, Rome, 2004; La Triennale, Milan, 2004;
9. Pagine di fotografia italiana 1900-1998, Fondazione Galleria Gottardo, Lugano, 1998;
10. Les Choix d'Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fondation Cartier-Bresson, Paris, 2003.

• "He exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the George Eastman House in Rochester, the National Library in Paris, the Rencontres d’Arles."
• "The first major retrospective of his work is currently open at Palazzo Reale in Milan and will last through September 8th 2013"
• "He has mounted around 200 exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, including the great anthological exhibitions held in Arles in 1987, in Milan in 1990, in Lausanne in 1991 and in Paris in 1990 and 1997. The most recent ones have been in Milan (2005, Forma), in Paris, 2005 (MEP), in New York’s Leica Gallery in 1999, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 2001. He has also displayed his works at the Photokina in Cologne, at Montreal’s Expo and at the Biennial in Venice. In 1994 he took part in the exhibition ‘The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968’ at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His images form part of collections in various museums and cultural foundations, including the Calcografia Nazionale in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Maisonne Européenne de la Photographie, the FNAC Collection in Paris and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne."

Online galleries

• 10 photos from Venise des Saisons, including Vaporetto
• Use File:Photograph of Alberto Giacometti by Cartier Bresson.jpg as a template for uploading reproductions of the photos.

Praise

• "Italy's greatest photographer"
• "Among Italy’s cultivated classes, he is a household name. Yet in Britain and America Berengo Gardin is virtually unknown."
• "Gianni Berengo Gardin is one of the best-known Italian photographers worldwide."
• "In 1972, Modern Photography magazine placed him among the ‘World’s 32 Top Photographers’. In 1975, Cecil Beaton mentioned him in the book The Magic Image: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day. In 1975, Bill Brandt chose him for the ‘Twentieth Century Landscape Photographs’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He was the only photographer to be mentioned by E. H. Gombrich in the book The Image and the Eye (Oxford, 1982). Italo Zannier described him as the ‘most eminent photographer of the post-war period’. He is among the eighty photographers that Henri Cartier-Bresson selected for the exhibition ‘Les Choix d’Henri Cartier-Bresson’."

Awards

• World Press Photo award
• "In 2008, he was awarded the Lucie Awards Lifetime Achievement (other winners include Elliot Erwitt, Joel Meyerowitz, William Klein, David Goldblatt, etc.)."
• "In 1963, Berengo Gardin was awarded a prize by the World Press Photo. This was the first of a number of awards, including the Scanno prize (1981) for the best photography book of the year with India dei villaggi (a book about the villages of India), the Leica Oskar Barnack Award (1995) at the Recontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles for the book La disperata allegria: Vivere da zingari a Firenze (about the life of gypsies in Florence), and the Oscar Goldoni prize (1998) for the best photography book of the year with Zingari a Palermo (about the gypsies of Palermo). In 1990 he was the guest of honour at the Mois de la Photo in Paris, where he was awarded the Brassaï prize."

Bibliography

• From Christie's acution house:

1. Gianni Berengo Gardin, Venise des saisons, Testi di Giorgio Bassani e Mario Soldati, Editions Clairefontaine, Lausanne, 1965;
2. Gianni Berengo Gardin: Fotografo 1953-1988, Art&, Udine, 1988;
3. Fotografi italiani, Bolis, Bergamo, 1993;
4. Italo Zannier (ed.), Segni di luce, 3 voll., Longo, Ravenna, 1993
5. Gianni Berengo Gardin, Gli anni di Venezia, testi di Iosif Brodskij, Federico Motta Editore, Milan, 1994;
6. Roberta Valtorta (ed.), Pagine di fotografia italiana 1900-1998, Charta, Milan, 1998;
7. Gianni Berengo Gardin, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Peliti Associati, Rome, 2001;
8. Gli anni del Neorealismo, Fiaf, Turin, s.d. [ma 2001];
9. Giovanna Calvenzi, Italia, Contrasto, Rome, 2003;
10. Uliano Lucas (ed.), Storia d'Italia. Annali 20. L'immagine fotografica, Einaudi, Turin, 2004;
11. Gianni Berengo Gardin, Contrasto, Rome, 2005;
12. Paolo Morello, Gianni Berengo Gardin: Venezia, Istituto Superiore per la Storia della Fotografia, Palermo, 2006, pl. 51.