Peripheral Visions

A new exhibition at Hunter College shows Italian post-war photography in context.

The Hunter College Art Galleries presents Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present. On view through April 28, this exhibition showcases for the first time in the United States the works of major Italian photographers who have explored an alternative image of the country: a landscape bound to urban edges, focused on the discarded and the marginal, and deeply connected to a new identity which has developed side by side to the industrial and global transformation of Italian cities.

This group exhibition retraces the history back to the fifties, when photographers like Paolo Monti and Mario Carrieri focused on the blight and the beauty of a city like Milan, where an increasing urban sprawl was creating new social peripheries. The conceptual practices of Franco Vaccari and Ugo Mulas reveal the dynamic dialogue between photography and the overall artistic culture, leading up to Luigi Ghirri's photography of a new Italian landscape that he treated with a particular color palette. Ghirri's emphasis on the evocative power of the everyday recurs throughout the show and informs more recent and contemporary visions by artists such as Vincenzo Castella, Massimo Vitali, Francesco Jodice, and Paola Di Bello, among others. The installation also includes film-clips from well-known Italian movies, books and magazines where these photographs have been circulated, and a digital project built to illustrate pages from architectural magazines.

Curated by Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Professor of Art History at Hunter College, the show is the result of an educational process developed with graduate students, who have been engaged in the curatorial process. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Maria Antonella Pelizzari with writing by graduate students, and published by Charta Editions, Milan.
Top image: Paola Di Bello, <em>Sofa from Concrete Island, 1999/2001</em>. Courtesy of the artist. Above: Alessandro Imbriaco, <em>Untitled</em> from <em>A Place to Stay</em>, 2007-2011. Courtesy of the artist
Top image: Paola Di Bello, Sofa from Concrete Island, 1999/2001. Courtesy of the artist. Above: Alessandro Imbriaco, Untitled from A Place to Stay, 2007-2011. Courtesy of the artist
Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present
Hunter College Art Galleries
68th Street and Lexington Avenue, SW corner
Through April 28

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