Press Release: April 2008

LA STRADA
A Group Exhibition of Vintage Italian Street Photography
April 24-June14

Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of vintage photographs created in the 1950’s through the early 1970s that capture the flavor of life in post World War II Italy. La Strada (Italian for street), is comprised of images by photographers whose work is rarely seen outside of Italy as well as some newly rediscovered Italian masters.

The end of World War II marked a turning point for Italy and its people. It signaled the change that would kick-start Italian society into the modern age. The corpses of the dictator Mussolini, and his cohorts, strung up and brutalized by cheering, angry masses signify the collective relief, and joy, and the promise of a future filled with hope and opportunity.

After years of oppression, life could only get better, and slowly, Italy rebuilt and re-invented itself. Bombed-out cities were restored, the arts flourished, and a more prosperous and rejuvenated Italy ultimately triumphed. A new generation of photographers took to the streets capturing images of the people, uncensored and unrestrained, that revealed the many nuances of Italian life.

The Italian street photographers depicted exquisite moments of human interaction, as well as loneliness and isolation, and the everyday ironies that pass before our eyes. They were also masters at capturing the passion, human emotions and moods with a beauty that is sometimes breathtaking. A cinematic aura to the pictures could almost make us believe that the lives depicted unfolded on a neo-realist film set.

Nino Migliori occasionally photographed in four-picture sequences. His classic and most famous ‘Le mani parlano’ 1956, is a study of three Italian women embroiled in discussion, gossip or just idle chatter. The expressiveness of their hand gestures as they speak and the conversation flows from one player to the next is an unmistakably Italian moment.

Carlo Amorati had the good fortune and fast reflexes to catch a moment on the streets of Paris in the mid-1950s. A nun passes a young man dressed in a dark suit on the street; as each glimpses the other from the corner of their eye, the resemblance between the two is uncanny-- are they in on the joke or is it just an illusion?

Ruggero Rossi made an image in Milan in1962 that also speaks to the juxtaposition of lives in the city. He discovered an elderly coachman, seated alone in his carriage, perhaps waiting for a fare. The expression on his face is the perfect foil to the large advertisement posted above him of a young blonde whose eyes seem to gaze in the identical direction as our taxi driver. It’s as if their attention is jointly focused, young and old, on the same mesmerizing scene. Idle hours spent people-watching has long been a favorite pastime in Italy.

Augusto Cantamessa was one of many photographers whose abstract sensibility flourished. His remarkable images are sometimes less about people and more about the clever compositional arrangements that an inventive mind can capture using people, objects and architecture in an unconventional way. In one standout image, circa 1955, a row of seminary students, their heads covered in identical hats, seem to float at the bottom edge of the picture frame in a wide open sky…a metaphor, no doubt, for men of God and their proximity to heaven.