Exhibition
The Museo Diocesano is devoting an exhibition to Giovanni Chiaramonte (Varese, 1948 – Milan, 2023), regarded as one of the greatest masters of Italian photography, whose work contributed like few others to the poetic and conceptual redefinition of the image of the contemporary landscape. The exhibition celebrates the artist one year after his death, on 18 October 2023.
The exhibition itinerary consists of 40 images spanning more than two decades, from 1980 to the early 2000s, of research into the different ways of perceiving landscape and the urban view, always central to Chiaramonte’s photography and theoretical reflection.
It is an exploration that unfolds along the key points of Western history and identity, starting from Italy, whose landscape – bearing the marks of a long stratification of cultures and customs – becomes the matrix for reading and understanding the whole of the West, its character and its destiny. In a pilgrimage that takes in Athens and Rome, passes through Berlin and reaches as far as the Bosphorus and Jerusalem, the photographer portrayed the vestiges of the Old Continent in search of the origins of our civilisation.
The journey, which extends as far as the United States and Central America to trace the development of the West’s path – bound to tradition yet inevitably projected towards a different future – becomes at the same time a theoretical reflection on the act of photographing and on the nature of the object represented, evoking also a reflection on the very act of seeing.
For Chiaramonte there is no predetermined point of view from which to observe the landscape; he sees it instead as a place open to different interpretations, which follow the dynamics of individual experience. The title, Realismo infinito, refers both to the line of the horizon, a central element of landscape photography, and to the multiple representational possibilities that every scene contains within itself.
The exhibition will be completed by a tribute to Giovanni Chiaramonte’s contribution to the creation of the 2011 Evangeliario Ambrosiano (Ambrosian Gospel Book), for which the Diocese of Milan commissioned a number of shots from the master, presented here in a dedicated section.
Giovanni Chiaramonte, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1991 © Archivi Giovanni Chiaramonte
