Italo Zannier (Spilimbergo 1932), inintellectual, teacher, curator of famous exhibitions, collector and photographer, first holder of a chair of History of Photography in Italy as well as a reference figure for the recognition of the discipline in our country. The exhibition at the Harry Bertoia Gallery in Pordenone, open until 4 May 2025, curated by Marco Minuz and Giulio Zannier, investigates precisely this “multitude” of Zannier’s passion and commitment towards the photographic discipline.
For the first time, the many activities related to photography that Zannier carried out with a strength and passion that is unparalleled on the national scene are collected.
The path develops in all his main experiences starting from his participation in the neorealist movement; Passionate about cinema, he first tried his hand at Super 8 shorts and then dedicated himself entirely to photography. In 1955, in a lucid analysis, draws up the manifesto of Friulian group for a new photographywhich includes, among others, photographers such as Carlo Bevilacqua, Toni Del Tin, Fulvio Roiter, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Nino Migliori and friends from Spilimbergo Gianni and Giuliano Borghesan and Aldo Beltrame.
This partnership is credited with promoting, among the first in Italy, the concept of a new photography no longer just focused on the aestheticization of the shot aimed at beauty, but seeking an experimental and analytical phase in an innovative sense.
From Zannier’s shots, therefore, his “critical story” is immediately apparent, readable from his characters, environments, objects and social typology and the places to which they refer.
A reading that also develops in reference to the field of architecture where Zannier investigates the Friuli area that lives on tradition and change. Rich and essential photographs become testimony to an entire community and, by fixing stories, landscapes and traditions held in images that become relics, over time, records their evolution and change.
A Friulian society that Zannier sees becoming Italian and European, from peasant to industrial. In the series of diachronies – concluded in 1976 – Zannier emblematically returns to shoot in places where his lens had taken almost twenty years earlier, with the same parameters and with the same subjects he creates a new shot that allows the passage of time to emerge clearly. Here the past becomes the future and Zannier declares the essential role of photography in recording this historical flow which, in the case of the environments he immortalized, becomes even more emblematic for the disastrous earthquake that will erase many of the places he photographed.
But the relationship with architecture also embraces collaborations with the most important newspapers of the time, such as Il Mondo, Comunità, Casabella and Domus.
University teacher since 1971, first in Italy to hold a chair in the History of Photography, he teaches at the IUAV and at Ca’ Foscari in Venice, at the Dams in Bologna, at the Cattolica in Milan and in other Italian universities.
He dedicates himself to the publication of books, essays and articles, collaborating with sector magazines such as L’Architettura “chronicles and history”, Camera, Photo Magazine, Popular Photography, Fotografia Italiana “il Diaframma”.
He edits series such as Fotologia “Studies in the history of photography” and Fotostorica, “the archives of photography”.
After more than thirty years, Zannier resumes photography: with a new enthusiasm he observes the spaces of globalization that make the contemporaneity of our existence standard, as in the “Veneland” project.
The exhibition itinerary will focus on his non-fiction production (over six hundred), the curation of famous exhibitions as well as the photographic section of the exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis held at the Guggenheim in New York in 1994, “The Self and its Double” at the Venice Biennale and editorial projects such as the titanic work, supported by ENI, on Coasts and Mountains of Italy, nine volumes in which he will be involved from 1967 to 1976.
Carlo Franza
Tags: Aldo Beltrame., Carlo Bevilacqua, Nino Migliori Foundation, Fulvio Roiter, gianni berengo gardin, Gianni and Giuliano Borghesan, the manifesto of the Friulian group for a new photography, Italo Zannier, Prof. Carlo Franza, Friulian society, Toni Del Tin