Photography: nature, man, war. Paolo Pellegrin at the MAXXI

Paolo Pellegrin is perhaps the best known Italian photographer in the world: member of theMagnum agency since 2005, traveled everywhere with his camera and told of men, women, children, wars, but also of a powerful and pulsating nature. And now the MAXXI in Rome is dedicating an anthological exhibition to him from 7 November 2018 to 10 March 2019. They are over 150 his images on display, the result of two years of work on the artist's entire photographic archive which traces his years of activity between 1998 and 2017, through unpublished images and videos.

The exhibition itinerary is divided between two extremes: the dark and the light. You enter a dark environment, where black environments dominate: war dominates, the images of the suffering it carries with it, the destruction of cities, houses, the violent desolation that dominates the places. Of a diametrically opposite color is the luminous space of the second part of the exhibition, in which the images of a nature prevail which, majestic, seem to recall the transience of human existence.

Pellegrin was born in 1964 and is not a traditional photographer. The images are moving and are sometimes presented alone, sometimes grouped with other photos so that the image is understood and completed through the set of images taken. The battle of Mosul in 2016, at the entrance, chosen by Pellegrin as a metaphor for the conflict, and which explodes like a contemporary Guernica, is majestic and tragic. But violence is not only in Iraq, it is also lurking in highly civilized America, in the streets of Miami that speak of violence, race, poverty, crime, just like the photos taken from Gaza to Beirut, from El Paso to Tokyo, from Rome to Lesbos. The surprising photo of a young Roma stands out, a contemporary and timeless portrait, almost a Mona Lisa to be exhibited at the Uffizi.

The two parts of the itinerary are connected by a passage that projects the visitor into the activity of Paolo Pellegrin, in his visual research and passes through the drawings, notebooks, notes, small photographs, which explain the complexity of the creative moment a photographer who is both study and instinct.

As he writes Germano Celant, the curator of the exhibition:

 “Reportage, for Pellegrin, is not an accelerated and fast, detached and cold operation, but – as for Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander – it is a manifestation of personal interpretation, which feeds on aesthetics and expressiveness, on anguish and of suffering. It is the synthesis of a critical position of the photographer with respect to the impersonal vision of reality: a story, divided into moments and chapters, which helps to put the situation faced and those who document it into context. […] His photographs are fragments of a writing in images and reflect a historical time, based on the individual and collective physiognomies of people experiencing a tragedy. They also become a private story of Pellegrin who feels the need to share, with his presence and his testimony, the responsibility of our culture towards these dramatic events."

At the same time as the exhibition, the first part of the photographic project created by Pellegrin last January in L'Aquila is presented as part of the photographic project entrusted to him by MAXXI. The other part of the work consists of large color photographs in which, after leaving the city, Pellegrin portrayed the countryside and mountains around L'Aquila during a night illuminated only by the moon. These images will be exhibited for the first time at Palazzo Ardinghelli on the occasion of theinauguration of MAXXI L'Aquila, in 2019, a project entrusted by the MiBAC to the MAXXI Foundation to contribute to the rebirth of the territory also through culture.