Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

Gianni Berengo Gardin

Italian photographer (1930–2025) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gianni Berengo Gardin
Remove ads

Gianni Berengo Gardin (10 October 1930 – 6 August 2025) was an Italian photographer who concentrated on reportage and editorial work, but whose career as a photographer encompassed book illustration and advertising.

Thumb
Berengo Gardin in 2015

"Undoubtedly the most important photographer in Italy in the latter part of the 20th century",[1] "[f]or more than fifty years Gianni Berengo Gardin has been taking photographs with the humility and passion of a great craftsman."[2]

Remove ads

Life and career

Summarize
Perspective

Born in Santa Margherita Ligure on 10 October 1930,[3]: 12  Berengo Gardin lived in Switzerland, Rome, Paris, and Venice before starting as an amateur photographer in 1954.[4] As a photographer, he was self-taught, learning photography from two years he spent in Paris working with other photographers.[5]

In Berengo Gardin's first year as a photographer, 1954, his first photographs were published in Il Mondo.[6][7]: 124  This magazine, edited by Mario Pannunzio, was one to which both amateurs and professionals liked to submit their work, although until 1959 the photographs were not attributed to particular photographers. It "pursued a photographic aesthetic that privileged street scenes and odd, ironic or bizarre encounters in both town and country",[7]: 122  and "more than a third of the photographs published in Il Mondo were by [Berengo Gardin]."[7]: 124  His "rare capacity for capturing simultaneous actions and objects within the same frame positioned him as an excellent candidate for that street life Pannunzio was after."[7]: 124–125  Berengo Gardin would later have photo essays published in Domus, Epoca, l'Espresso, Stern, Time, Vogue Italia;[1][8] Réalités;[1] Le Figaro;[8] and La Repubblica.[9]

He turned professional in 1962 and two years later moved to Milan,[4] where he lived from 1975 onwards.[10]

From 1966 to 1983, Berengo Gardin worked with Touring Club Italiano, providing much or all of the photography for books about regions of Italy and other European countries or their cities:[6][11] he once identified the high point of his career as "The work I did in Great Britain, for the Touring Club in 1978" (adding that "I loved the cars: I had an Austin and an MG").[5] He did similar work for the publisher Istituto Geografico De Agostini (later De Agostini Publishing).[6][11] In 1979 Berengo Gardin started to work with Renzo Piano, photographing the process of designing his buildings.[6] Berengo Gardin also worked with major Italian firms – Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Italsider (later Ilva), Olivetti and others – showing the working life of employees, rather than the products.[6][11]

In the early 1990s, Berengo Gardin spent time living among the Romani people (Zingari) of Italy, hoping to show their lives from the inside. This resulted in two highly regarded books, La disperata allegria (Florence) and Zingari a Palermo (1994 and 1997).[11]

From 1990, Berengo Gardin was represented by Contrasto.[6]

Berengo Gardin remained active in his eighties. An assignment, from la Repubblica, was to photograph the giant cruise ships that threaten the ecosystem of Venice.[9][12]

Berengo Gardin had a large archive, with over 1.5 million negatives.[10] The FORMA Foundation (Fondazione FORMA per la Fotografia, an offshoot of Contrasto), in Milan, will be managing this archive, including negatives, prints, documents and cameras.[13] (Other material is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.[14])

Berengo Gardin named as influences on him the French photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat and Robert Doisneau;[5] others have identified the Italian group La Gondola and the American photographer W. Eugene Smith.[7]: 126 

Gianni Berengo Gardin is one of the great generation of poetic documentarists who like to compose with an idea in mind [...] [H]is sympathies have always been with those whose day-to-day activities support the fabric of society: workers, doctors, priests and even itinerant musicians.[15]

Berengo Gardin died on 6 August 2025, at the age of 94.[16]

Remove ads

Vaporetto, Venice, 1960

Summarize
Perspective
Thumb
Vaporetto, Venice, 1960, © Copyright Gianni Berengo Gardin

Berengo Gardin's "most renowned image of Venice", often referred to as Vaporetto, Venice, 1960:[n 1]

was taken in 1960, on a vaporetto with mirrored doors so that the passengers are trapped in a mosaic of reflections. Simultaneously mundane – the travellers are ordinary commuters – and exotic, it captures the paradox of a city trapped in an excess of representation.[9]

Berengo Gardin described how it came about:

I was 30, living on the Lido in Venice, and every morning I took the vaporetto, or water bus, across to where I worked in San Marco. [...] It was a matter of pure luck, really. I was doing a lot of architectural photography, and this was a spontaneous shot: I only took one picture. In the centre there is a reflection in the glass door of the vaporetto, behind which stands a man all dressed in black. If he'd been wearing white, the shot wouldn't have worked.[5]

The photograph was included in Berengo Gardin's book Venise des saisons (1965).[17] It was warmly received; Henri Cartier-Bresson:

ranked [this photograph] among the 80 most important photographs ever taken. The co-presence of gazes and of frames within a frame makes it an exceptional in-camera montage of different spaces and human figures, reminiscent of Velasquez's illusions, and suggestive of this photographer's multiple artistic influences: the French school of reportage (Doisneau, Boubat, Ronis) and a group of Venetian photographers called La Gondola [...] and Eugene Smith's powerful renditions of black and white. At the end of the 1950s this new kind of reportage seemed to reconcile social documentary with the photographer's subjective exploration of the world, thus putting an end to the dispute about form and content that had divided many postwar image makers.[7][n 2]

Remove ads

Books

Main article: Gianni Berengo Gardin bibliography
Thumb
A small selection of photobooks by Gianni Berengo Gardin (flanked by irrelevant Pelicans)

Berengo Gardin was the sole contributor or a major contributor to a large number of photobooks: the exact number up to any time depends on various definitions – what a separate book is (as opposed to a mere new edition), what a "major" contribution is, and more – but one estimate in 2014 put the number at 250 (and added that "only 10 are in colour").[10]

Morire di classe (1969) is probably the most celebrated among Berengo Gardin's books.[10][n 3] Other award-winning books (see "Awards") include India dei villaggi (1981, about the villages of India) and La disperata allegria and Zingari a Palermo (1994 and 1997, about the Romani people of Florence and Palermo respectively).

"Books such as Dentro le case and Dentro il lavoro are some of the best journalistic records of how people worked and lived in post-WWII Italy."[11][n 4]

Exhibitions

Summarize
Perspective

Berengo Gardin had many exhibitions: the number was described in 2008 as "around 200".[6] A small sample is listed below.

Remove ads

Awards

Remove ads

Collections

Remove ads

Further viewing

  • Gianni Berengo Gardin. Rome: GIART/Contrasto, 2009. In the series Fotografia italiana: 5 film, 5 grandi fotografi.[n 5]: 252 

Notes

  1. [n 1]
    The title or caption varies, even in Italian. Italo Zannier, ed, Gianni Berengo Gardin: fotografie 1953–1990 (Udine: Art&, 1990; ISBN 88-85893-23-6): "Venezia, il vaporetto, 1960". Mario Peliti, et al, eds, © Copyright Gianni Berengo Gardin ([Rome]: Peliti Associati, 2001; ISBN 88-85121-69-1): "Venezia, 1960". (In each of these books, the plates are neither numbered nor on numbered pages.) As for English, here are three examples. Gianni Berengo Gardin, ed. Susanna Berengo Gardin, Italians = Italiener (Kempen: teNeues, 2000; ISBN 3-8238-5453-4), plate 58: "Venice: in a vaporetto, 1960". Roberto Koch and Alessandro Mauro, eds, Gianni Berengo Gardin (Rome: Contrasto due, 2005; ISBN 978-88-89032-72-5), plate 11: "On a vaporetto, Venice, 1960". Denis Curti, ed., Gianni Berengo Gardin: Stories of a Photographer (Venice: Marsilio, 2013; ISBN 978-88-317-1501-0), first (unnumbered) plate: "Venice, aboard a vaporetto, 1960".
  2. [n 2]
    "In 2003, Henri Cartier-Bresson was curator of an exhibition, Les Choix d'Henri Cartier-Bresson, for his newly inaugurated Paris Foundation. This presented a variety of works that resonated for him, by a range of international artists. Gianni Berengo Gardin's Vaporetto was among the images included." "Gianni Berengo Gardin (B. 1930) Vaporetto, 1960 (sale 4225 lot 10)". Christie's. 12 June 2012.
  3. [n 3]
    Alone among books by Berengo Gardin, it is introduced in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's three-volume survey of photobooks; specifically, in The Photobook: A History, vol 2 (London: Phaidon, 2006; ISBN 0-7148-4433-0), p.246
  4. [n 4]
    Both books have photographs by Berengo Gardin (Rome and farther north) and Luciano D'Alessandro (Rome and farther south); Dentro le case was first published in 1977, Dentro il lavoro the following year. (The latter should not be confused with Berengo Gardin's Dentro il lavoro. Nello studio di Andrea Martinelli, of 2005.)
  5. [n 5]
    Introduced in Bruno Carbone, ed. Gianni Berengo Gardin. Il libro dei libri. Rome: Contrasto Due, 2013. ISBN 978-88-6965-444-2.
    Remove ads

    References

    External links

    Loading related searches...

    Wikiwand - on

    Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

    Remove ads
    Remove ads