5 photography exhibitions not to be missed

As the third stage of its partnership with the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Triennale Milano is hosting La vita moderna (Modern Life), the largest Raymond Depardon exhibition ever held. Depardon's career as a French photographer is both long and fundamental, ranging from his work as a photojournalist in the 1960s to his work as a director in collaboration with Claudine Nougaret, from the foundation of the Gamma agency with Gilles Caron to his collaboration with Magnum, from his participation in the Mission photographique de la DATAR to the seminal Beyrouth centre-ville. The major exhibition, curated by the artist Jean–Michel Alberola, spans eight photographic series and two films. The central thread is provided by Errance (1999-2000), where the vertical format and the centrality of the viewpoint offer a vision that is both pure and mediated, and the large wall prints converse with the small, framed ones, underlining the relationship between immersion and contemplation on the one hand and displacement and restlessness on the other. The perfect identity between form and content continues in the room dedicated to La France, the series that from 2004 to 2010 took Depardon around the provinces of his country in a van, photographed in colour and in large format: the complexity of the production and the magniloquence of the setting mirror the stories of a minor France, to which dignity and importance are restored. This is followed by the immense Rural (1990-2018), on show for the first time, the specular but incomparable Piedmont and Communes (2001 and 2020), the Nordic colours of Glasgow and the black and white alienation of Manhattan Out (both 1980) and above all San Clemente (1979-1980), a vivid and participatory account of Italian psychiatric hospitals during the years of the Basaglia revolution. The films New York, N.Y. (1986) and San Clemente (1980) complete a simply unmissable exhibition. (Triennale Milano, viale Alemagna 6, Milan, until 10 April 2022).

Un'idea di paese (An idea of a country) is the title of the complex exhibition and educational project with which Spazi Fotografici, together with ISIA Urbino and above all Fondazione Un Paese, intend to restart, relaunching its ideas and values, from the famous "film on paper" that Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini made in Luzzara with Einaudi in 1955. One of the earliest and most important examples of photo books, Un paese is in fact not so much the point of arrival of the cultural conspiracy hatched by a photograph that became a narrative and a narrative that became a vision, as a starting point from which to begin again and again. Reinterpreted several times over time by many authors and many institutions, the original project lives on a very important legacy, which Spazi Fotografici is now putting back into circulation in Sarzana. On show are big names such as Stephen Shore, Olivo Barbieri, Luigi Ghirri or Gianni Berengo Gardin, but also Hazel Kingsbury Strand, who accompanied her husband Paul in 1955, and the many authors who followed in his footsteps and example in the years that followed. A crucial moment of the project are also Archivio Bellosguardo and Archivio Atena, the results of two residencies in Campania conceived by Alessandro Imbriaco and coordinated by Alessandro Coco, which sow the seeds of future workshops that will ideally unite Luzzara and Sarzana in a dialogue that promises to be of great interest. (Fortezza Firmafede, Sarzana, until 21 November 2021).

Another town, this time in the hinterland of Ravenna, is at the centre of Monumento Fiume, a double solo exhibition representing the outcome of two separate photographic campaigns commissioned by the municipality of Cotignola and the Luigi Varoli Civic Museum. Intertwined in the rediscovered spaces of the former Ospedale Testi will be Sul Confine (On the Border) by Michele Buda and Scalandrê by Marco Zanella, two works deeply linked to the territory, investigated from the point of view of its historical stratification and social heritage. The history of Italy has indeed written a brief but important stage here, when the Senio river, which cuts the town in two and continues through Romagna, acted as a natural borderline between the Nazi–Fascist and Allied troops for 145 days at the end of the Second World War. Almost wiped off the map, Cotognola does not live sterile in memory today, but through Buda and Zanella's investigations (later published by Humboldt Books and Cesura Publish respectively) returns with new lifeblood to question itself about its own nature and what makes its identity both unique and universal. The two photographic series will be accompanied by Monumento Fiume, the soundscape created by sound designer Giovanni Lami from field recordings and acoustic re–elaborations recorded in the town and around the Senio, which is an auditory archive of an often invisible reality and which significantly gives its name to the entire operation. (Ex Ospedale Testi and Chiesa del Pio Suffragio, Cotignola, until 9 January 2022).

Iran is at the heart of Freedom is not Free, the heterogeneous reflection that Mashid Mohadjerin makes on her own country and now brings to Milan thanks to Twenty14, poised between art and documentary photography, between collage and archive. A reflection that begins with the post–revolutionary experience of 1979 but unfolds throughout the author's entire life span, crossing a broader geographical and conceptual space and extending to the very idea of nationhood as seen through the lens of freedom. Mohadjerin thus retraces her own experience through the Middle East and North Africa, but always taking into account, at the extremes of a professional and personal, and therefore public and private, story: her native Iran, a place of departure but also of return, and Europe, represented by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Antwerp, where her study, culminating not only in an exhibition project but also in an artist's book, began as a PhD. (Penati Atelier, via Saffi 9, Milan, from 17 November 2021 to 28 February 2022)

A further declination of country is offered by Salvatore Vitale with How to Secure a Country +, his first solo exhibition in Italy presented in the Project Room of Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia. In this complex transmedia project, produced between 2014 and 2019, the Palermo–born artist investigates the Swiss security system through the privileged lens of slow–journalism, an approach that eschews the temptation of "newsworthiness" and focuses on documentation that is apparently neutral but always charged with meaning and mediated by interpretation. Switzerland thus becomes a metaphor for a way of conceiving itself in relation to foreign countries and the outside world, of relating to themes such as immigration and protection, of representing itself according to the paradigms of power and control. (Camera, via delle Rosine 18, Turin, until 12 December 2021)