Giovanni Chiaramonte’s last project opens at the ADI Museum in Milan

On October 18th, what will be Giovanni Chiaramonte's last curatorial project was inaugurated in the ADI Design Museum in Milan: Fotografia alla Carriera. Omaggio della fotografia italiana ai maestri del Compasso d’Oro (“Career Photography. Italian photography's tribute to the Compasso d'Oro masters”). This photographic exhibition, curated together with Michele Nastasi, sees a collection of 151 images that reflect the relationship between contemporary photography and Italian design.

The exhibition illustrates through images the relationship with design and masters of the Compasso d'Oro, highlighting the singularity of each shot and, simultaneously, recognizing a transformed connection with the Italian products. This exhibition highlights the centrality of photography in building an image of Italian excellence, which, from the 1950s to today, has had too little resonance, despite having played a central role. From here, the curators, through historical research, have therefore placed six great photographers of the past alongside contemporary ones, thus succeeding in their aim of showing the visitor not only the subject of the photography but its relationship with the context and thus mending the history with a look at the contemporary.

Photography then appears here as a form of research, as a narrator, as a fundamental component of an ever-evolving design history. An exhibition that perhaps opens up future potential and which certainly takes on an even stronger value following the recent death of Giovanni Chiaramonte, who passed away a few hours after the inauguration, thus leaving us a tribute to transforming photography and the historical tale of excellence - that of design - which still leaves room for interpretation and discovery.