Gianni Berengo Gardin, Genova, 2001, Il ponte sopra la città e la ferrovia, 2002. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI
event
Friday 25 November 2016 ore 18:00 - 19:30

The Histories of Photography.Industry and Photography. With Urs Stahel

Guido Reni Hall – single ticket €5.00 – carnet five seminars €20.00 – free for myMAXXI cardholders and students of art and architecture eligible for educational credits.
Purchase of a ticket entitles the holder to reduced price museum entrance within a week of issue

A series of seminars devoted to the history of Italian photography from the Seventies to the present

On the occasion of the exhibition Extraordinary visions L’Italia ci guarda international lecturers, critics and researchers will be meeting the public to explore the fundamental episodes in the history of photography and to introduce the great masters who have borne testimony to and documented the history of Italy.

In the final seminar in the series, Urs Stahel, head of exhibitions and the industrial photography collection of the Fondazione MAST Manufattura di Arti, Sperimentazione e Tecnologia in Bologna explains how the relationship between society and industry, especially in the past, has frequently been subject to moments of crisis. Industry has always responded to the demands of society, bringing enormous advantages, creating prosperity and making life easier. But how has this relationship been recounted over time?
Photographs of factories were long treated with indifference and only recently, thanks to a progressive reassessment, have they begun to be recovered and conserved, thus avoiding the erasure of testimony to the history of global industry and culture.
As the artist and curator Jorge Ribalta says, photographing machinery, industrial articles and working tools is not like photographing anything else. There is always a correspondence between the metallic perfection of the objects and the optical precision of the photographic processes.

The Histories of Photography project has been produced thanks to the support of MINI, a MAXXI Public Programs Partner