The exhibition will run until January 28, 2024, at the National Museum of the Italian Risorgimento in Turin Ivo Saglietti. Nomadic look required by the association Glass door chaired by Michele Ruggiero and edited Tiziana Bonomo/ArtPhoto.
A tribute to the photographer, who died last December 2 at the age of 75, and to his “nomadic gaze” that, in a career spanning more than forty years, can tell the history and stories of our time.
Nomadic look
The exhibition itinerary connects 53 black and white photographs manufactured between 1980 and 2018, selected by Ivo Saglietti himself with curator Tiziana Bonomo. The images are accompanied by texts taken from the books by photographer Paolo Rumiz, Tiziana Bonomo, and Federico Montaldo’s Revolution AND An Uneasy Look.
The curator underlines: “Ivo Saglietti, a photographer who brings with him the courage of those who report and the sweetness of a gaze in constant wonder, a spirit freed from conditioning, few words, but who tells a lot with his photos. He rarely solves his projects in a few days: he likes to let them take a long time, and deepen them.
The photographer himself said, “Slowness is the essence of photography. Or at least mine is. In my vision, there is no good photography if I don’t have time to linger about places, to observe the reality that surrounds me. When I arrive at my workplace, I rarely pull out my camera on the first day. I advance, I go back, I walk, I walk, I observe, I take notes. When language permits, I try to exchange a few words with people. All very slowly, I allow myself to be penetrated by sensations, I try to harmonize with places and people”.
From there comes that “nomadic” and deep view, able to say – in the face of dramas, crises, and conflicts – “the human side, the most intimate, the most mundane”.
Ivo Saglietti
Born in Toulon in 1948, after a period as a cameraman in the production of political and social reportage in Turin, he took up photography in 1975. In Paris since 1978 made numerous trips as a reporter-photographer for documents commissioned by French and American agencies as well as major international magazines (Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Time, The New York Times), crisis and conflict situations in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.
Meantime, started working on long-term projects with The Sound of Sabers, a report on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1986-1988), which later became the subject of his first photography book. Over time, he increasingly focused on long documentary projects: he traced the traces of the slave trade in Benin, visited sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and created a photographic record of the three main diseases that ravage third-world countries: AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Since 2000, he has been an official member of the German photojournalism agency Zeitenspiegel Reportagen.
He received the World Press Photo Award in 1992 for a report on the cholera epidemic in Peru, in 1999 for a report on Kosovo, and in 2011 for a photograph on Srebrenica in Bosnia. He published and exhibited his work all over the world. He published books On the Shadow Side (Mondadori Electa), Under Abraham’s Tent (Peliti Editor), Chile. The Sound of Sabers (publisher LM), Niger Delta (Prospect notebooks), Suddenly in Life (published by Sagep), A possible world (Peliti Editor), An uneasy look (Postcard), Return to Deir Mar Musa. Father Dall’Oglio’s Utopia (Emus).