At Palazzo Roverella in Rovigo, from 28 September 2024 to 26 January 2025, the most important exhibition Italian monographic exhibition on Henri Cartier-Bresson, focusing on the long relationship between the French master and our country.
The exhibition, promoted by the Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo Foundation with the Municipality of Rovigo and
Concordi, with the support of Intesa Sanpaolo, is created in collaboration with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and the Fondazione CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Turin, curated by Clément Chéroux and Walter Guadagnini, directors of the respective Foundations.
For the first time, the relationship between the man who has been defined as “the eye of the century” and Italy is documented in an exhaustive and in-depth manner. Through approximately 200 photographs and numerous documents – newspapers, magazines, volumes, letters – the exhibition retraces the stages of a relationship that began very early, already in the 1930s, and continued until the moment in which Cartier-Bresson he abandoned photography in the seventies.
The exhibition, arranged chronologically, begins with the first trip to Italy, which took place at the beginning of the 1930s by a very young Cartier-Bresson (born in 1908), who had just definitively abandoned painting for 
photography, in the company of his friend André Pieyre de Mandiargues, a young poet and writer, and his companion, the painter Leonor Fini. From this pleasure trip, the photographer takes some of his most famous images, all present in the opening section of the exhibition.
The second journey, no less significant, takes place at the beginning of the 1950s and touches Abruzzo and Lucania, then lands of great cultural, sociological and indeed photographic interest, emblem of that South in which tradition and modernity, poverty and social changes faced each other. A central figure in the construction of the image of the South and in particular of these regions is the writer and painter Carlo
Levi, a fundamental reference for the many photographers, both Italian and foreign, who move between Matera and the towns in the area, including Scanno near L’Aquila, which became famous thanks to the shots of Cartier-Bresson and later Giacomelli. Particularly interesting, also from a historical point of view, are the images of the distribution of land, a crucial moment in the recent history of the country.
Having become a living legend of photography, Cartier-Bresson returned to Italy several times between the 1950s and 1960s, creating features for the major illustrated magazines of the time, including “Holiday” and “Harper’s Bazaar”, dedicated above all to Rome, Naples, Venice, the big cities that aroused the interest of foreign readers, and to Ischia and Sardinia, stops that allowed the photographer to exercise his gaze on the habits and customs of the country and its inhabitants. In particular, the various shots taken in Rome fully convey the climate of those years and the specificity of a country that had not yet conformed to the dominant culture from overseas. It is no coincidence that some of these images flow into one of the photographer’s best-known books, “Les Européens” (1955), which tells the story of the new Europe that was now in full development after the tragedy of the Second World War.
The exhibition has its final developments and its closure with the images of the early Seventies still dedicated to Matera, a real return to the places frequented twenty years earlier, in which it is easy to read continuity and discontinuity of time, the advance of modernity and the persistence of local identities, and with those dedicated to the world of industrial work, between Olivetti and Alfa Romeo, which instead shift the attention specifically to the new ways of life of the period.
The exhibition is composed of vintage works from the Fondation Cartier-Bresson, and is accompanied by explanatory texts in each room and by a catalogue, published by Dario Cimorelli Editore, which includes all the works on display, essays by the two curators and by Carmela Biscaglia, the latter dedicated to the events and characters that made Cartier-Bresson’s relationship with Basilicata unique.
Carlo Franza