Photographing architecture, capturing outstanding images of buildings, inside and out, and adding to the composition depth, passion and drama while trying to infuse in that image the architect's intentions, is a form of art. In some cases famous architects became not only clients, but avid supporters of particular photographers as they managed to highlight the best features of the buildings they designed. This is what happened to Giorgio Casali, the Italian photographer who contributed to build a visual history of Made in Italy architecture and design.
For over thirty years, from the '50s to the '80s, Casali photographed the work of the greatest post-war Italian architects and designers for monthly magazine Domus, founded by Gio Ponti in 1928. "Giorgio Casali: Photographer / Domus 1951-1983 - Architecture, Design and Art in Italy", a new exhibition about the artist (currently on also in Verona) will open at London's Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in May, showcasing a selection of images taken from the Fondo Casali, located in the Archivio Progetti at IUAV University in Venice.
Born in 1913 in Lodi, Casali moved to Milan in 1928 where he worked as an apprentice in the Rambaldi photographic studio for ten years prior to establishing his own studio in partnership with Giovanni Muzzarelli in 1940.
In the early 1950s he opened his own studio and started getting interested in architectural images: in 1951 he took an iconic picture of Gio Ponti’s iconic Superleggera chair in which he managed to convey through crispness, luminosity and the pose of a model holding the chair with a single finger, the extreme lightness of the object portrayed.
After that picture he became a collaborator of Domus and of other Italian architecture and design magazines such as Casabella, Ottagono and also Vogue, creating elegant and witty images that contributed to give Italian design a new self-confidence and that were often featured in exhibitions all over the world (in the '70s his work was showcased in Paris alongside that of Aldo Ballo, Ugo Mulas and Charles Eames).
Many images included in the event at the Estorick Collection, curated by Angelo Maggi e Italo Zannier, chronicle forty years of creativity, starting from the economic boom in Italy and include Ponti’s Torre Pirelli (Milan, 1956) and his Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio in Taranto (1971); Roberto Monsani’s Villa Brody (Greve in Chianti, 1973); the Arco (1962) and Ipotenusa (1975) lamps designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and Gianni Pareschi and Umberto Orsini’s Libro armchair (1970) that looks like an open book.
Casali mainly employed a 6x6 reflex camera, creating perfect shoots that never needed to be retouched or edited by the staff at Domus. The photographer didn't just establish his own visual language, but created his own architectures giving the works portrayed in the images a sense of timelessness. For this reason some images will be accompanied in the Estorick event by the actual designs they portray, including Ponti’s Superleggera chair and the mushroom-shaped, blown-glass lamps by Angelo Mangiarotti, dating from 1966.
The images on display at the Estorick Collection will be divided into four sections - cover images for Domus, photographs of key design objects and buildings and vintage prints by Casali that are unconnected with the worlds of architecture and design, such as weddings portraits and images of artworks (Casali collaborated with Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti and Umberto Milani among the others), as well as travel photographs and more intimate, private studies of friends and family members.
The Casali exhibition at the Estorick Collection will also featured a new film by the artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone (note for visitors: it will be shown between 26th June and 4th August).
Entitled Everything Made Bronze it revolves around Carlo Scarpa’s Gipsoteca (plaster-cast gallery) in the Museo Canova in Possagno, northern Italy, and the Venice-based plaster workshops of Eugenio de Luigi, one of Scarpa’s most important collaborators.
Though particularly relevant to the exhibition as Scarpa's Brion cemetery was the subject of one of Casali's key reportages, the film will also allow visitors to juxtapose Casali's black and white images from the '60s with their intersections of architectural planes, vistas, apertures and screens, to moving images and realise how Casali's perspective and his design awareness gave a new level of depth to his photo stills and an additional tension that contributed to the dynamism of a scene.
Giorgio Casali: Photographer / Domus 1951-1983 - Architecture, Design and Art in Italy, 22 May to 8 September 2013, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1 2AN,
Image Captions:
Photographic credit: IUAV University, Venice - Archivio Progetti, Fondo Giorgio Casali
1. Superleggera chair, designer Gio Ponti, 1952. Manufactured by Cassina; digital print on aluminium
2. Hand-shaped vase and ashtray, design Ico Parisi, 1966; digital print on aluminium
3. View of the grand staircase at La Rinascente in Rome, designed by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, 1962; digital print on aluminium
4. View from inside an apartment in Florence, designed by Gae Aulenti, 1971; digital print on aluminium
5. Centro Fly in Milan, op-art background and dress by Krizia, 1966; digital print on aluminium
6. Libro armchair, design Gianni Pareschi and Umberto Orsini, 1970. Manufactured by Busnelli; digital print on aluminium
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