The exhibition An Italian Itinerary. Photographs from the 1800s from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection organised on occasion of the VI edition of the Rome International Festival FotoGrafia, this year entitled A question of Italian, will feature a selection of over 100 photographs from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection of historical photographs.
The collection today comprises around 2500 works, many of which have never been shown to the public, and gives the festival and its audience a unique insight into photography in Italy during the 1800s, as well as an exemplary model of a unique, long-standing and vast collection.
The exhibition, produced by Zoneattive with the contribution of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and organised in collaboration with La Soprintendenza alla Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea / Museo Hendrik C. Andersen and l'Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, is curated by Maria Francesca Bonetti, head of the photographic Collection of the National Instirute for Graphic Design in Rome and by Filippo Maggia, curator of Italian photography for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin).
The collection of photographs, built up by Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, is a unique section of the collection, which differs, although at the same time is needed to tell part of the story of her internationally acclaimed collection of contemporary art and especially of the development of the collection, first started in the early nineties. The photography collection has also partly been influenced by Turin, the city in which it was conceived, which has an incredible history in the field of photography.
Tracing the steps of a collection, which is intensely followed internationally by collectors and both the public and private sectors, saw the following of major photographic works from the seventies making up part of the contemporary art section, which still continues to develop and make its mark on the great influence of photography as a means of artistic expression as much today as in the past. Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is an institution that is dedicated to promoting the work of Italian contemporary artists and different means of artistic expression, side by side with their dedication to the restoration and preservation of its collection of Italian historical photographs, also as a means of confrontation for today’s generation of artists using photography in their work
The exhibition route is based on a kind of visual archive concept, in the order of subjects that were more used, more frequently photographed and the principal clients and buyers of the period – the artists themselves, intellectuals and aristocrats, travellers and explorers in Italy and the first collectors of photography, who were dedicated to expressing the atmosphere and visual experiences of the places brought to light within these works by great photographers working in Italy around the second half of the eighteen hundreds (such as Luigi Sacchi, Giacomo Caneva, Frédéric Flachéron, Eugène Constant, Domenico Bresolin, Venanzio Giuseppe Sella, Charles Marville and Adolphe Godard), as well as experts of the early wet-plate or Collodion process and the later introduced dry-plate process - glass plates with a photographic emulsion of silver halides suspended in gelatin (Robert Macpherson, James Anderson, Leopoldo Alinari, Moritz Lotze, Henri Le Lieure, Pompeo Pozzi, Giorgio Sommer, Robert Rive, Déroche & Heiland, Carlo Naya, Antonio Fortunato Perini, Carlo Ponti, Tommaso Cuccioni, Gioacchino Altobelli, Lodovico Tuminello, Enrico Verzaschi, Paolo Lombardi, Alphonse Bernoud, Pietro Poppi, gli studi Brogi, Incorpora, D’Alessandri, Giovanni Crupi and Mauro Ledru, etc.), up to some important figures of the Italian Pictorialism movement and also some of its more refined amateurs (such as come Vittorio Sella or Wilhelm Von Gloeden and Wilhelm Plüschow), who sometimes originated from the art scene of the end of the Eighteen hundreds (such as Francesco Paolo Michetti or the painter Zampighi), who in other cases would be little or totally unknown as artists.
The Italian photographic itinerary, which in the Eighteen hundreds would have identified with the historical relationship between the country and the representation of its landscapes, in a country rich with natural and artistic beauty, which was the Italy of the Grand Tour, was still quietly perceived as a happy and harmonious result of the choices and interventions of man upon nature, is shown here in its origin and confronts one of the most important “questions” in Italian photography: that of the redefinition and construction of a new image of Italy, starting from the last two decades of the Nineteen hundreds, with the surpassing of the more stereotypical and conventional representations of the country, which makes this probably the most meaningful and principal trends in contemporary Italian photography.
