Milano, un minuto prima. Nuove visioni di una città is an exhibition currently at Forma in Milan, co-curated by Matteo Balduzzi, Arianna Rinaldo, Giulia Tornari and Francesco Zanot. Each of the curators chose a few artists gathered under the common theme of the city of Milan, elaborated in many different ways and expressing various photographic styles, going from documentary to reportage, from a conceptual approach to a personal diary. I visited the exhibition last week and grabbed some mobile phone shots of the installation, hope you'll enjoy the small virtual tour.
Suddenly a corner of the gallery struck my attention: pieces of paper with some text were lined up on the wall together with small prints, all neatly nailed onto it, with no frames. The typewriting of the text somehow matched the quiet tone of the square photographs, showing interior and urban scenes, both colour and black and white, sharp and beautifully composed images, with that unspecified quality that in Italy we are used to call 'northern European'. And yet the images were deeply emotional, whether they were showing people walking on a street, a dog cuddling in the middle of a room, a man ironing his clothes, they had something really strong flowing through them.
Then I realised it was the text, those words were holding me in that corner of the gallery, forcing me to slow down the pace and telling me when and how to move from one image to the other. I remember little of what they said, other than it was the story of a man's crisis, private sufferings recalled in a handful of blue sheets of papers, written by Massimiliano Foscati and photographed by Bernd Kleinheisterkamp. Words and photographs rarely get such nourishment from each other, and I was so moved by the text that I had to photograph it, so I could have read it again, and I could have looked at it again, almost as if it was another photograph in the show. I'm posting one excerpt right below here - I hope the author won't mind.
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