Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present. This landmark exhibition, on view from February 3-April 28, 2012, showcases, for the first time in the United States, the works of major Italian photographers who have explored an alternative image of the country: a landscape bound to urban edges, focused on the discarded and the marginal, and deeply connected to a new identity which has developed side by side to the industrial and global transformation of Italian cities.

This group exhibition retraces the history back to the fifties, when photographers like Paolo Monti and Mario Carrieri focused on the blight and the beauty of a city like Milan, where an increasing urban sprawl was creating new social peripheries. The conceptual practices of Franco Vaccari and Ugo Mulas reveal the dynamic dialogue between photography and the overall artistic culture, leading up to Luigi Ghirri's photography of a new Italian landscape that he treated with a particular color palette. Ghirri's emphasis on the evocative power of the everyday recurs throughout the show and informs more recent and contemporary visions by artists such as Vincenzo Castella, Massimo Vitali, Francesco Jodice, and Paola Di Bello, among others.