Exhibition
A visual essay on the work of Mario De Biasi (1923-2013), a versatile photographer described by Enzo Biagi as “the man who could photograph anything”. And within that “anything”, he had a particular fondness for the capital of Lombardy, where he moved at the age of 15. So, a hundred years after his birth, the Museum devotes to him an Edizione Straordinaria (Special Edition) that brings together a series of iconic shots dedicated to his adopted city.
The exhibition, organised and produced by Mondadori Portfolio in collaboration with the Museo Diocesano in Milan and curated by Maria Vittoria Baravelli and Silvia De Biasi, presents 100 photographs – mostly vintage prints, contact sheets and previously unpublished shots – taken over almost seventy years of work by one of the most admired photographers of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy, who for three decades documented the history of our country through the pages of the magazine Epoca published by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore.
The exhibition itinerary – made up of works from the Archivio Mondadori and the Archivio Mario De Biasi – allows the public to discover the personal language that De Biasi adapted to very different contexts. And, in particular, to Milan.
A gaze that is at once lucid and evocative, able to portray with immediacy and originality a controversial moment in Italian history. In the ordered textures of his shots one can indeed read the historical and cultural changes of the country, which in the 1950s and 1960s was settling into a renewed cultural identity.
