Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by Nino Migliori in honor of his recently published book Signs (Damiani 2005). The exhibition will open the evening of April 26th with an artist’s reception and book signing. The images will be on view until June 24th.

Beginning in the 1950s, Nino Migliori (born Bologna, 1926) was compelled to take to the road with his camera to procure the true meaning of “la dolce vita” in his beloved Italy. With an accomplished eye, he recorded the people and places of a newly emerging society, from the impoverished peasants of the south to their more affluent northern countrymen-- all portrayed with an affectionate sensibility.

Migliori, a prominent figure in the neorealist school of photography, produced a rich and significant body of work in post-WWII Italy. The country was engaged in throwing off the repressive shackles of a fascist regime, an idealistic pursuit not lost on its photographic community. Migliori and his fellow documentarians pledged to expose the human condition and all its foibles, replacing romanticization with wit and humanity. Traveling to the southern regions to expose the pride of its people and the prejudice under which they toiled, symbolized a rite of passage for Migliori and for other photographers of the postwar generation. Migliori also documented a traditional way of life in the North that would soon be transformed by modernization. The charming old-world ambience of its towns and the marvelous characters trolling its streets are a fascinating study of a culture on the precipice of change.

Some of his most intriguing images were conceived as sequences presenting a narrative from beginning to end. A series of four images titled Le mani parlano 1956 (The hands speak) depicts a trio of old Italian women embroiled in discourse—a remarkable study of facial expressions and hand gestures that need no textual explanation. In another endearing series, I ragazzi della via 1955 (Boys of the street), a gang of six boys engaged in mock battle-- armed with peashooters-- dart across the picture frame.

Italian neorealists admired the American aesthetic of Social Realism. They were influenced by seemingly diverse “standards” of American photography that played out concurrently: the work produced by The Farm Security Administration- a collective of socially-concerned photographers in Depression-era America; the singular work of one inspiring American, Paul Strand, who changed the face of photography as illustrated in his Italian work, Un Paese (with text by Cesare Zavattini, Einaudi 1955); as well as the impact of photojournalistic essays advocating social change that were sponsored by weekly news magazines like LIFE. Such were the influences that resonated within the work produced in Italy in the 1950s. Until now, this period of Italian photography has not received the scholarship it so richly deserves.

Migliori’s spontaneous visual records of wonderful little moments captured in the everyday lives of the Italian populace lasted less than a decade, but yet survive as his most powerful vision. His ongoing experimentation- with cliché verre, camera-less photography, light abstraction, serial portraiture and hand-worked polaroids, represents a fraction of the self-imposed challenges undertaken by this multi-faceted artist.