The photographic exhibition Sport Shots. Valuable Shots, curated by Roberto Mutti in collaboration with 3M Foundation, Lecco Municipality, and Si.M.U.L., will open at Torre Viscontea on Friday, January 31st.

The exhibition marks the beginning of the rich exhibition season 2025 of the Municipality of Lecco, which will see the realization of 9 exhibitions of great cultural, historical, and social interest throughout the year.

The photographic project is born to develop and disseminate positive and current messages about sports in view of the upcoming 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. After the starting stages in Milan and Rome last year, the exhibition will be displayed in the elegant spaces of Torre Viscontea in Lecco from February 1st to 23rd, 2025.

Conceived and realized by 3M Foundation and sponsored by CONI Lombardy Region, the project Sport Shots. Valuable Shots includes exhibitions and dissemination activities throughout the Lombardy region to raise awareness and engage the general public.

At the core of the project is the idea that the connection between sports and photography is not only about capturing spectacular images of performances and victories but has much more to offer to the public. It testifies to educational values, social aspects not necessarily competitive, environmental contexts, and represents the inclusion of all diversities, trust, and empowerment of individuals within groups.

The exhibition is divided into four monographic sections over time, from the 1930s to today. It starts with the investigation that a great author like Elio Luxardo carried out on the body, then comparing the black and white images of the early days of photography, series and compositions in costumes and gestures, with the color images of the second half of the 20th century, focused on spectacularity. Contemporary authors, finally, explore the values that sports represent, with images that go beyond descriptive aspects, using metaphor, symbolism, allegory, with photographs characterized by a remarkable evocative power.

The works in the exhibition belong to the archive of 3M Foundation - ETS, a permanent cultural institution for research and education and owner of a historical photographic archive of 110,000 images (plates, photographic postcards, negatives, vintage prints, and reproductions), coming from the historic Italian photographic company Ferrania (acquired in the '60s by 3M) and from a series of donations and acquisitions over time and recently.

"Since its inception, sports have been a collective phenomenon that makes those who practice it proud and fascinates those who observe it. In the past, this sense of living rich in symbolisms, rituals, metaphors was described only in the words of great poets like Homer and represented in statuary or vase painting. The advent of photography has profoundly changed our perception of sports because what was once imagined now had a real counterpart with which everyone has had to confront: athletes in their presentation, spectators in observing them, photographers in capturing them. If portraits have become interesting testimonies of anthropological flavor, it is the documentation of athletic gestures that has revealed on one hand the fascination of what the eye could only perceive for a moment and on the other hand the photographer's skill in capturing the decisive moment, in choosing the most suggestive framing, in encapsulating in a single image that sense of epic that has always permeated sports." - Roberto Mutti.

Free admission