Who thinks about the images of Gianni Berengo Gardin It almost certainly has a black and white photograph in mind. That it is a perfect game of joints on a vaporetto in Venice, the city of origin of his family and his training; That it is the kiss of a couple set between infinite arcades, aboard an old car overlooking the Scottish or sitting seas, regardless, on the sidewalks of Milan. In the Lombard capital he lived for most of his life, winning in 2012 a Golden Ambrogino, the utmost civic honor assigned by the Municipality of Milan to those who distinguished themselves for a special contribution to the city, both by birth and for “adoption”.
Born in Santa Margherita Ligure on 10 October 1930Gianni Berengo Gardin is dead On the evening of August 6th In Genoa, at 94, after making the history of photography and reportage, capable of telling our country, and Venice in particular, with honesty. From the beginning of the 1950s to 2025, the reporter has collected with its Leica and its recognizable black and white an archive of exterminated images, with over one and a half million negatives, documenting from the post -war period to today social issues, such as the conditions of the psychiatric patients and the marginalized communities; the world of work and the working class; The simplest daily life and landscapes and architectures of Italy and the rest of the world.
The photographic debuts
Still self -taught photo, received from the uncle of America, who worked at the International Center of Photography in New York, some books that collected the research of the reporters of the Farm Security Administration (American government agency that was established in 1937 on the objective of documenting rural life during and after the great depression): Cornell Capa, Hungarian photographer-Stanittendo’s brother of the most famous Robert had advised them to him. In a few days, they changed his way of looking and shooting, pushing him to follow the example of the American colleagues who worked for Life And Magnumthe most important magazine and agency of the time. “American photography was only a certain thing and it is the one that affected me: the social reportageThe photographer told. According to his own, he did not feel artist, but craftsman. He was not an interpreter, but a narrator.
A little over twenty years he joined the Venice Stock Photo “La Gondola” and the Friulian group for a new photograph at the invitation of Italo Zannier, and then found, a few years later, the group “Il Ponte”. His images came Published for the first time in 1954 in the weekly magazine The world by Mario Pannuzio, the debut they followed, with the Professional career started in 1962collaborations with the most important national and international newspapers, from Domus to Era And The espressofrom Le Figaro And Stern al Timeand the realization of more than 250 photographic books and hundreds of personal exhibitions all over the world, of which the last at the National Gallery of Umbria, inaugurated last May and can be visited until the end of September.
After the imprinting of the American report, among the most important meetings that Gianni Berengo Gardin remembered there was the one with Ugo Mulas In Milan, who taught him the distinction between a beautiful and a good photograph. “Since then I went in search of the second. In reality I have made many beautiful ones and only some good». Among the many prizes won during his very long career, we remember the World Press Photo in 1963, the Lucie Award to his career, in 2008, and the Kapuściński award in 2014 for the reportage, and to demonstrate that he did much more than one.
The social reportage: from psychiatric sick to the Italian province
1969 is the year of “Die class”his work on the conditions of the sick in Italian psychiatric hospitals, created with the photographer Carla Cerati and published with texts chosen by the psychiatrists Franco Basaglia and Franca Ongaro Basaglia: made in four hospitals – that of Gorizia, directed by Basaglia, that of Colorno, near Parma, and those of Florence and Ferrara – this project made history, contributing to the reform of the psychiatric hospitals in Italy (and subsequently in other countries) through law 180/1978, the so -called Basaglia law. “We only photographed with the consent of the sick, – said the reporter. – But we didn’t want to show the disease, but the condition“.
In 1973 he collaborated instead with the writer and poet Cesare Zavattini To tell Luzzana, a town in the province of Reggio Emilia, after the social changes that occurred with industrialization: a country was born twenty years later “, followed by the first book that Zavattini had made in 1955 with the American photographer Paul Strand.
At the end of the seventies Gianni Berengo Gardin collaborated with his colleague Luciano D’Alessandro to “Inside the houses” (1977) and “Inside the work“(1978), telling the daily life in the homes of the big Italian cities and in the industrial plants and leaving one of the best reports on how people lived and worked in post -war Italy.
Between the eighties and the early nineties, the reporter followed several groups of gypsies between Florence, Palermo, Padua, Reggio Emilia, Trento and Bolzano, to tell their way of living in a free way from all those prejudices that at the time accompanied this minority: “The desperate joy. Living from Zingari to Florence” He was published in 1994 and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award earned him.
The collaboration with Renzo Piano and the photography of architecture and landscape
Arrived in Milan, among the first things he photographed there were people and suburbs, in particular that of Sesto San Giovanni, and the various Milanese environments, from which the book was born People of Milan, Published in 2010 and containing images taken from the 1950s.
From 1966 to 1983 the reporter collaborated with the Italian Touring Club and parallel with the‘De Agostini Geographical Institute, Telling the landscapes and geographies of Italy and Europe and since 1979 the reporter has carried out a collaboration with the architect Renzo Piano for over thirty years, documenting the realization of his projects in all their phases, from the Center Pompidou in Paris to the Osaka airport, to the San Nicola di Bari stadium, photographed between cement blocks and workers at work. In those same years, he collaborated with the companies symbol of the Italian industry, from Olivetti to Fiat, from Alfa Romeo to IBM.
The reporter began to photograph his Venice in 1954 and could not remain indifferent to the theme of large cruise ships that entered the Judecca channel, such as “Monsters long twice Piazza San Marco, twice high Palazzo Ducale”: here between 2012 and 2014, waking up at five in the morning to make real stalking, the images of the passage of the large ships in the most characteristic corners, of the impact that this testimony would have had collected in “Venice and the great ships” and published in 2015. The great ships, from August 2021, can no longer pass in front of San Marco and along the Judecca channel in Venice.
