Gianni Berengo Gardin

He was born at Santa Margherita Ligure in 1930 and started to take photographs in 1954. After living in Rome, Venice, Lugano and Paris, in 1965 he settled in Milan, where he embarked on his professional career, devoting himself to reportage, social inquiry, the documentation of architecture and description of the environment.
He has contributed to the principal illustrated periodicals in Italy and abroad, but has devoted himself primarily to the production of books, publishing over 260 volumes of photographs. His first photos were published in 1954 in II Mondo, edited by Mario Pannunzio, to which he continued to contribute until 1965, publishing hundreds of photographs. From 1966 to 1983 he worked with the Touring Club Italiano, producing a long series of volumes on Italy and the countries of Europe, as well as with the Istituto Geografico De Agostini of Novara. He has worked regularly with industry (Olivetti, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, IBM, Italsider, etc.), producing features and books on companies. In 1979 he began to collaborate with Renzo Piano, documenting the stages in the realization of his architectural projects.
He has held around 360 solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad, he has also shown at Photokina in Cologne, the Montreal Expo in 1967 and Milan in 2015, and the Venice Biennale; he took part in the exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994.
His pictures can be found in the collections of many museums and cultural foundations, including the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Musée de l‘Elysée in Lausanne and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.
In 1972 the magazine Modern Photography included him in its list of 32 of the ”World‘s Top Photographers.“ In 1975 Cecil Beaton mentioned him in his book The Magic Image. The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day.
In 1975 Bill Brandt selected him for the exhibition “Twentieth Century Landscape Photographs” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He was the only photographer cited by E.H. Gombrich in his book The Image and the Eye (Oxford 1982). In Storia della Fotografia Italiana (Rome-Bari 1987), Italo Zannier described him as ”the most eminent photographer of the postwar period.“ He was one of the 80 photographers chosen by Cartier-Bresson in 2003 for the exhibition ”Les choix d‘Henri Cartier-Bresson”. In 2015 he appeared in Hans-Michael Koetzle’s volume “Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica Photography”.

Milan, Italy