Gianni Berengo Gardin: Beyond La Dolce Vita

Gardin’s first serious works with a camera were published in Il Borghese, then by Il Mondo in 1954, the latter edited by Mario Pannunzio, with whom he collaborated until 1965. Il Mondo was one of the Italian magazines to give independent space to photography, to recognize its value, not just as an accompaniment to an article.

After living in Rome, Venice, Lugano and Paris, Gardin settled in Milan in 1965, where he started his freelance career focusing on documentary, travel, architectural and environmental photography. His major clients included Touring Club Italiano and the Istituto Geografico De Agostini, as well as industrial giants including Olivetti, Alfa Romeo and Fiat. In 1979, he started working with acclaimed architect Renzo Piano. Since 1990, he has been represented by the agency Contrasto, with a major focus on the publication of photography books, his preferred vehicle for presenting his imagery.

Gardin’s 200-plus books have often been the basis of solo exhibitions and brought him to the attention of curators around the globe for inclusion in group shows. In 1994, the exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York exposed Gardin to an American audience. In 1975, Bill Brandt chose his work to be part of the Twentieth Century Landscape Photographs exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Gardin was also among the 80 photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson selected for the exhibition Les Choix d’Henri Cartier-Bresson. In Gardin’s case, you can judge a person by the company he keeps.

Black and White: It seems that your eye is primarily drawn to documenting daily life. Where does this interest comes from?

Gianni Berengo Gardin: I’ve always been interested in documenting human beings in all social contexts. I think also because my photographic culture was formed by the great American documentary photographers such as Eugene Smith and Dorothea Lange, and by French humanist photography, of which I personally knew several exponents, especially Willy Ronis, who was a bit of my teacher. I learned a great deal, both about technique and about the way of understanding photography.

BW: He had a profound affect on me as well, especially with the concept of street photography. I remember him telling me, “Street photography is like fishing, you never know what you’re going to get.” It’s so much more meditative and humanistic than the concept of “hunting for a photo.”

GBG: Even before I met him, I had avidly read his invaluable Photo-Reportage et chasse aux images, a small handbook full of technical advice and more. In Paris, I used to accompany him on his image-seeking tours, particularly in the working-class neighborhood of Ménilmontant. I was a bit of a baggage carrier for him, but I could observe him in action and take pictures myself. He taught me to be curious, to look around to catch interesting subjects even in the most everyday scenarios, to know how to wait, and also not to be afraid to get close to the subject while not being indiscreet and attracting attention.

BW: Where did you first meet Ronis and other luminaries of French photography?

GBG: At a club called 30×40 in Paris, where they would invite an important French photographer each month to give a talk and to show their photographs. That is where I met Boubat, Daniel Masclet, Doisneau and Ronis. Many call me the Italian Cartier-Bresson, but it’s Willy Ronis who most influenced me. I met Cartier-Bresson many years later, when most of my ideas about photography had already matured. That said, one of my photographic bibles was Images à la Sauvette by Cartier-Bresson, as well as the Farm Security Administration photographs, LIFE magazine and The Family of Man. Steichen’s book and exhibition showed life as it really was, something that was and continues to be very important to me. I’m also a big fan of French cinema, especially from the 1930s and 1940s, and American writers such as Steinbeck and Faulkner. Literature is in black and white, and I visualize in black and white. A photographer, like a writer, has his style and keeps to it.

BW: You continue to express your vision with black-and-white rather than color film and with mechanical rather than digital cameras. Why this approach in the digital age?

GBG: I started by photographing with a Rolleiflex, because in the 1950s in Italy magazines hardly accepted small format. After being in France, where everyone used the 24×36 format, I bought my first Leica for wide-angle and Nikon for telephoto. Leica is my favorite camera. I have had all the major models, and I still use them. I would say 80 percent of my photographs have been taken with a Leica. Black and white is my thing. Of course, for certain professional assignments I have also used color, but for my kind of reportage I think black and white is definitely more effective. I find color distracting, it takes attention away from the subject. Black and white gives that gap from natural vision, which forces you to look harder.

I recognize some advantages to digital, such as immediacy—you can send a photo to the other side of the world seconds after you take it—and the ability to adapt to lighting conditions. But I find digital photography too metallic, cold, precise, whereas I like the grain of film. And then I think that the ability to shoot endlessly and edit the photo on the computer also changes the photographer’s look. One no longer selects, something will come out anyway, and instead the photo has to be first “thought out,” then taken. Meanwhile, the world is flooded with useless photographs, or rather images, devaluing the value of “real photography.” Not to mention that there is no more printing, and it will end up that there will be no more archives to preserve our memory.

BW: Your memories are steeped in history, including growing up under the Axis umbrella. What was it like in Italy during the war years?

GBG: During the war I was living in Rome with my mother, while my father was a prisoner of war of the British in India. He thought of Mussolini as Italy’s savior, but he was not a fanatic. My mother, who was Swiss, was a feminist before the word was created, and was a strong believer in democracy. In 1943, I was 13 years old. It was a particularly hard time, with the German occupation, the bombing, the difficulty of finding food. My passion for photography had yet to be born, but it was during that time that I picked up a camera for the first time. The Germans had ordered the townspeople to hand over all weapons and cameras. But before handing it over to the authorities, I took my mother’s old Ica Halloh bellows camera and went around Rome taking pictures. It was a gesture of defiance, even a bit unconscious, my way of protesting. There is no trace left of those photos, I don’t even remember what I photographed, but perhaps I had already sensed the testimonial value that photography could have.

BW: You were born in Liguria and live in Rome, but consider yourself Venetian. What does that mean, and how does it manifest in your photography?

GBG: My roots are in Venice. My father’s family was Venetian. For many years they owned a historic Murano glass and pearl store near St. Mark’s Square. As a child in the summer, I would visit my grandparents, who had a house overlooking a side of the cathedral. When my father returned from captivity, he decided to go back to Venice with my mother and me. There, I went to high school, met my wife, my children were born, and I rediscovered photography. I took my first real steps as an amateur photographer and had the good fortune of being able to attend one of the most important Italian photography circles, La Gondola, which was right next door to the store. The great photographer Paolo Monti was among them. So Venice became the subject of my first photographs, which I would take when I was free from the store.

BW: What kind of photos would you take on these early explorations?

GBG: I would go around when there were few tourists, especially in winter, and document the daily life of us Venetians. Thus was born my first book Venise des Saisons, which came out in 1965 for a Swiss publisher. I have since dedicated several books to the city, one of the latest, Venice and the Big Ships in 2015, to denounce the havoc of the passage of giant cruise ships within such a fragile city. I love Venice very much, and to see it reduced to an amusement park for the exclusive use of tourists, as it is reduced today, tugs at my heartstrings.

BW: In addition to the photographers of La Gondola, Cornell Capa was a major influence.

GBG: Capa was a good friend of my uncle, who had fled to America before the war because he was Jewish. My uncle asked him to recommend some books and magazines to send over to his Italian nephew who was mad about photography. I was probably among the first in Italy to learn about American photography in depth. My uncle would get me issues of Popular Photography, LIFE and Infinity, the magazine of the Association of American Photojournalists. He sent me several books, including the seminal exhibition catalog The Family of Man. I thus discovered the work of Robert Capa, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand and the Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Eugene Smith. As for French humanist photography, on the other hand, it was crucial to move to Paris in 1954, so I got a job working at the front desk of a large hotel. When I had time, I would go out and photograph. That’s when I joined the 30×40 photography club.

BW: In addition to photographers, writers have played an important role in shaping your vision.

GBG: Since I was a boy—before I was an avid collector of photography books—I was a great reader. After the war, I discovered and became fascinated with American literature—Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos in particular, all of whom were instrumental in shaping my imagination. Dos Passos was not only a novelist, but also an anti-capitalist, a radical. When I later discovered American photography I found there the stories, the landscapes, the environments I had already known through those great writers. Another important writer was, and still is, George Simenon, whose pages seem to be written by a photographer. It is no coincidence that Simenon in his travels always carried a camera with him, with which he documented atmospheres and landscapes that he would later use for his books.

BW: You started your freelance photography career in 1965, at the age of 35. Why did you decide to change at that stage of your life, and what kind of assignments did you start doing?

GBG: I was collaborating with Il Mondo as well as other magazines. I had won a number of competitions, exhibited in group shows, published my first book, a few commissions had already come in, but I hadn’t decided to take the plunge into freelance until then because I had a young family and a good job in Venice. But after a long conversation with the director of Camera, Romeo Martinez, about my photography, I finally decided to move to Milan and go into the profession full-time. It began by working as an employee, but before long I opened my first studio with a colleague. Initially, I accepted everything I could find. Then came the first important collaborations, including with the Italian Touring Club for a series of illustrated volumes on Italy and with Olivetti.

BW: Adriano Olivetti seemed focused on the ideal that corporate profits should be reinvested for the benefit of society as a whole, and not just line his and other industrialists’ pockets.

GBG: When I started working for Olivetti in 1967, Adriano had been gone for some years, but his approach still permeated the organization of the company. Employees were not just a labor force. The factory was part of a system in which social, health, educational and leisure services were provided. There was a unique focus in Italian industry on culture. They organized exhibitions, published books and magazines. It was a real school of life and knowledge. Among the collaborators were writers, architects, artists and cultural personalities. There was special attention to communication and image. Among the photographers who worked for Olivetti in those years were Ugo Mulas, Paolo Monti and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I worked for the communication office for about 20 years. I photographed assembly lines, factories built by great architects. Above all, I photographed blue-collar work, so I got to know the workers, which informed my political development, its mutation as technologies changed, and services for employees such as canteens, schools, summer camps, libraries and exhibition spaces inside the factories. The collaboration with Olivetti then brought me assignments from other major companies, such as General Electric, IBM, Alfa Romeo, Ansaldo, FIAT.

BW: You also took on a very sensitive topic during this same period. How did your series on psychiatric institutions come about and how did you approach it?

GBG: My friend Carla Cerati had been commissioned by the weekly magazine L’Espresso to photograph psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, director of the asylum in Gorizia. Basaglia was an innovator, the bearer of revolutionary ideas in the field of patient treatment. Carla asked me to accompany her, and I agreed, making it clear, however, that I would also be shooting. In Gorizia, Basaglia had already introduced important innovations—abolishing physical restraints, the use of electroshock, tearing down the fences and gates of the wards—and restored dignity to the patients who wore civilian clothes and no longer had their hair shaved to nothing, as was the custom then.

When Basaglia saw the photos we had taken he was thrilled, and we decided with him to make a book about the reality of asylums in Italy, which was very different from the one in Gorizia. It was not easy to get into those places of confinement, and it was emotionally very taxing. Our intent was not to photograph the disease, but the terrible and inhumane conditions in which psychiatric patients were kept—completely abandoned to themselves, wandering in dilapidated environments, tied to beds, locked inside cells. As Carla and I would go to the mental institutions, we would hold meetings with the patients to ask their consent and explain what we hoped to accomplish. These so-called “lunatics,” who weren’t that mad at all, understood us perfectly. Thus was born Morire di Classe, published in 1968 by one of Italy’s leading publishers, a book of denunciation that made public opinion aware of a hitherto little-known reality. The book contributed to the movement of opinion that led in 1978 to the law to close psychiatric institutions. It is the work I am most proud of, along with the reportage I did on the Roma camps in Florence years later.

BW: What was that project about?

GBG: In 1993 I did a long reportage in three different Roma nomadic camps in Florence. Initially, I showed up without a camera, introduced by members of an association that dealt with minority rights. I was thus able to familiarize myself with them and overcome their obvious mistrust, explaining my project—to document daily life in the camps in all its aspects, not only the negative and better-known ones such as the poor environmental and sanitary conditions in which they lived, the material difficulties, the dirt, the lack of water and services, but also the positive ones such as their festivals, traditions, family occasions and their moments of leisure and sharing.

I lived with them for some time. They were incredibly helpful and generous, opening their homes to me and letting me participate in their everyday life, even in the most intimate aspects. This work became a book, Desperate Cheerfulness, Living as Gypsies in Florence, which to my great pride won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles in 1995. I think it was an important work, because in addition to exposing the terrible conditions in which the Roma are often forced to live in Italy, it told aspects of their lives and culture that are virtually unknown, perhaps succeeding in debunking some of the prejudices with which we usually look at them.

Two years later, I had the opportunity to approach the Roma community in Palermo. A settled community of Slavic origin, they lived in settlements consisting of small brick houses, not caravans. Although they were of Muslim or Greek Orthodox religion, they had adopted the cult of Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of the city. On the occasion of Herdelesi, their most important holiday, commemorating the sacrifice of Isaac, they would make a pilgrimage to the shrine of the saint to pay homage to her. The festival lasts three days, during which the sacred water that flows into the shrine’s cave is used for the ritual bathing of children and is celebrated with bonfires and music and dancing in the woods around the shrine. It’s an extraordinary meeting of cultures. This reportage also became a book, Gypsies in Palermo. Herdelesi and Santa Rosalia in 1997. Both encounters gave me a great deal on a human level. I came into contact with a rich and vital culture, and I met some exceptional people.

BW: Photography books are powerful legacies that speak to future generations long after the subjects in them and the photographers that documented them are gone.

GBG: Years from now the houses they lived in, the transportation they used, the buildings they worked in and the jobs they did will be gone as well. My goal with the books is to leave a visual record of our epoch.

Addendum
All images © Gianni Berengo Gardin/Courtesy Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia. Special thanks to Roberto Koch at Contrasto Books contrastobooks.com and the Contrasto Galleria in Rome contrastogalleria.com and the Peter Fetterman Gallery (peterfetterman.com) in Santa Monica for coordinating this interview.