Exhibition
The Museo Diocesano presents the first major exhibition in a Milanese museum devoted to Elio Ciol (Casarsa della Delizia, Pordenone, 1929), one of the foremost contemporary Italian photographers.
The exhibition presents a selection of 100 images, from the most celebrated to the lesser-known shots, capable of conveying the complexity of his research: the landscape, the rural world, faces and architecture all speak of waiting, silence, mystery and wonder in the face of reality.
Devoted to photography from a very young age, Elio Ciol soon began to develop his own personal language. From the 1950s he began to take some of his best-known photographs: among his favourite subjects were the Friulian and Umbrian countryside, the American canyons, Libya, Armenia and the Holy Land. Particularly important to his work were the various campaigns documenting works of art in Italy and Europe, which led him to collaborate with numerous publishing houses. His photography reflects a continual search for new techniques and experimentation, using both photosensitive plates and digital media.
Central to Ciol’s career – and therefore to the exhibition itinerary – are the projects carried out in the Friulian and Umbrian countryside and in the Milanese lowlands, as well as the shots from the Neorealist period and the on-set photographs from the film “Gli ultimi” (“The Last Ones”) by Father David Maria Turoldo. The exhibition will also give space to his portraits of iconic twentieth-century figures, including Pier Paolo Pasolini and William Congdon.
