Viewpoints: Italy in Black and White

This exhibition offered a rare opportunity to admire and explore an outstanding private archive of photographs by the most important modern and contemporary Italian masters, selected from the Prelz Oltramonti Collection.

Giuseppe Cavalli (1904-1961) was the leading force in Italian photography from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, creating unforgettable images of Italian people and places. During the war he moved to the provincial town of Senigallia where he met and subsequently mentored Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000), the most respected Italian photographer of his generation.

Ugo Mulas (1928-1973) was an outstanding photographer whose work was instrumental in shaping the work of a whole generation of Italian photographers. His magnificent portraits of artists such as Burri, Fontana and Calder are internationally acclaimed.

The exhibition also presented an extraordinary body of images by Mimmo Jodice, including a number of portraits and photographs dating from the mid-1960s. Born in 1934, Jodice is recognised as the most important living Italian photographer and one of the few whose work is known, exhibited and collected worldwide.

Spanning fifty years from the early 1930s to the beginning of the 1980s, the exhibition’s wide range of powerful and evocative imagery also included the street scenes and portraiture of Giorgio Avigdor and Mario Gabinio, and the experimental, avant-garde photography of Antonio Boggeri and Luigi Veronesi.

The exhibition was curated by Antonella Russo and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Skira, Milan.