Gianni Berengo Gardin at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice

If you use the Internet in your everyday life, then you are inevitably and constantly immersed in a world made of images. As thousands of images are poured in front of us day by day, we have somehow forgotten that they aren’t just made of electronic impulses. There are still images that possess a material quality which makes them particularly special. Hence, if you look up on the Internet Gianni Berengo Gardin, hundreds of black and white snapshots will appear, but nothing might impress you as much as seeing them printed and hung on a wall.

Gianni Berengo Gardin, born in 1930 in Santa Maria Ligure, is one of the most influential Italian photographers. Since he took his first shot in 1954, Berengo Gardin has never left the camera and has also never changed his tool: all of his photographs are rigorously in black and white and never digitally manipulated, maintaning an extremely unpolished and realistic sensibility of a true photojournalist. If you think, though, that he is a formalist, you are completely wrong. For Berengo Gardin using a raw language isn’t an issue of style, but about the process of documentation, capturing the reality, telling the truth.

Gianni Berengo Gardin’s truth is currently being told in the most complete anthological exhibition dedicated to his work titled “Stories of a Photographer” and held at Casa dei Tre Oci, in Venice. More than 130 photos were meticulously selected for this show with the idea of telling the story of his journey as a photographer: photos that are as sublime as they are real, as delicate as they are severe. But looking at the photos displayed at Casa dei Tre Oci one may also feel estranged. The beauty and reality of those images make them strangely surreal, as if they were taken on a set of an old movie, depicting the world where time has stopped and the genuine enthusiasm for life has finally emerged.