Biographies

Berengo Gardin, Gianni

One of the greatest photographers of social documentation, Gianni Berengo Gardin (Santa Margherita Ligure, 1930) “has documented social events of great import with constant and limpid civic duty, he has observed and fixed on film many moments of everyday life that are now part of our historical and anthropological heritage,” providing an account of half a century of Italian life unique in terms of its attention and sensitivity.
What is striking about his long career is the consistency of his gaze and style. Berengo Gardin has always had such respect for photography that he has never been tempted to exaggerate or force the idiom: his apparently simple (but never banal) images are free of any artifice and the result of a gaze ever faithful to reality, that never overshadows the life it proposes to narrate, whether it be social issues, private themes, reportages of customs or travel.
Similarly, when he photographs architecture or the landscape “Berengo Gardin places himself perceptively in a direct dialogue with what in the world most attracts him: the punctuation that the presence of man produces incessantly on the surface of the world.”
Berengo participated in the atlante italiano003 (with work on Genoa) and Cantiere d’autore projects.