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Museum of Contemporary Photography verified

Cinisello Balsamo, Lombardy, Italy closed Visit museumarrow_right_alt

closed Authentic testimony of a spontaneous situation

The show

Edited by Carlo Cavicchio, Maddalena Cerletti, Sabina Colombo
Museum of Contemporary Photography
4 December 2022 – 29 January 2023


The exhibition is a tribute to the photographer Ernesto Fantozzi (Milan, 1931) and the beginning of a work of enhancement, study and cataloging of his archive, recently donated to the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

“This photograph is the authentic testimony of a spontaneous situation” is the manifesto phrase meticulously pinned by the author on the reverse of each print. Few words, which express his idea of documentary photography far from any aesthetic formalism, instead rooted in reality and linked to the "things of life" which he describes with lively participation "as they are".

Fantozzi studied photography as a self-taught and joined the Milanese Photographic Circle of which he is still an Honorary and Meritorious Member. He photographed from the end of the 1950s to the early 1970s and, after a twenty-year break, resumed his activity up to the present day. At the end of 1965 he founded, together with Carlo Cosulich and Mario Finocchiaro, the "Group 66" made up of amateur photographers with the common goal and ideal of practicing a realistic documentary photography, testimony of reality. Fantozzi's black and white reportages they tell the everyday life he knows, the less flashy and more ordinary aspects of life. It documents the city of Milan and its hinterland, focusing on the urban and suburban landscape and on the story of social life within the metropolis with attention to the ongoing transformations, habits, relationships and people who cross it, who flow and they intertwine. In his photographs, layered and full of details, the old and the new, tradition and modernity coexist. With rapidity of vision, profound intuition and strong empathy, he captures the spontaneity of the gesture, the decisive instant full of meaning that makes photography the emblem of a situation.

In 2002 Ernesto Fantozzi was named "Author of the Year" by the Italian Federation of Photographic Associations and a year later received the title of "Master of Italian photography". His work has been exhibited at various institutions and published in magazines and volumes. His photographs are held in Italian and foreign public and private collections, including the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The exhibition traces his entire production and returns, through two different ways of viewing, the periods of his activity: the prints tell the story of the sixties; a projection instead presents photographs from the 1990s and 2000s. The exhibition is completed by a documentary and bibliographic apparatus aimed at showing archival materials and some of the numerous publications in which his work has been presented from the sixties to today.

Photography
Ernesto Fantozzi, Milan, 1958. In front of the TV

Gallery

Works on display

Timetable and tickets

Address

Via Frova, 10
20092 Cinisello Balsamo

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