Gian Paolo Barbieri is a legendary photographer, capturing the essence of Italian style and elegance. His work tells a gloriously Italian tale, intertwining fashion, photography, cinema, and celebrity in the 20th century. Spanning six decades, Barbieri’s lens chronicles the evolution of Italian fashion. From the rise of ready-to-wear, through the era of Novità & Vogue Italia in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Made in Italy movement of the 1980s and 1990s.
The exhibition presents a highly innovative selection of images to the public, both in terms of their setting and styling, the fruit of the unmistakable genius of the Artist who was the winner of the 2018 Lucie Award for Best International Photographer. It is a style of photography that is at once ironic and sophisticated, both rare and provocative, rich with references to art history, eclectic outdoor sets in exotic locations and allusions to cinema. Using colour, Barbieri recounts his own personal interpretation of fashion and feminine beauty: the women in the photographs on display free themselves from the more canonical poses of fashion photography instead becoming for the occasion spokeswomen of a new kind of unconventional elegance which reveals a more nonchalant, sensual side.
On display, the countless faces portrayed by French-Algerian photographer Michel Haddi who has succeeded in capturing the spirit of his time through the celebrities who have populated the history of fashion, film, and music. His take is intimate, personal and unconventional, just like much of his career, which is a far cry from that of a classic fashion photographer: having survived a troubled childhood, during which he clung to his dream of becoming a photographer, Haddi has dedicated his life to illustrating some of the key players in the historical and cultural changes of the last Century with a rare ability to capture, and then successfully replicate, the deepest essence of his subjects. Haddi, which literally translates from the Semitic language as ‘the one who sees’, has succeeded in the difficult task of seeing, precisely, the true nature of the subjects who posed for him in front of his lens and to replicate their image, at times ironically and at other profoundly: all his photographs have a story to tell because they are authentic pictures, which play with the most common human emotions and, precisely for this reason, become indelible.