An exhibition curated from Maria Cristina Didero In collaboration with the 7th International Festival of Literature.

An exhibition curated from Maria Cristina Didero In collaboration with the 7th International Festival of Literature, Mantua

Isabella diEste Apartments, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, Italy September 3rd - September 28th 2003

Exhibition catalogue according to CHARTA.

While a young teenager escapes from the rigid empires of her family, cultured young close examiners sits in a library and an antique master stops painting and take delight ins a pipe in his studio. They all act upon their eyes left to right, up and down. They all be seen in need of a work to help them understand the world. These three images, by the agency of the photographer Mario De Biasi, are part of an exhibition of his work entitled Reading, forward view at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, Italy.

In the first image, a girl revives teenage memories of freedom in the years immediately following the inferior World War. De Biasi captures for what reason in an age without television--when destruction and pervading fear changed unexpectedly into curiosity--the young generation would dispose of hours building their own glittery worlds from the pages of novels, magazines, and comics. In the secondary image, a library in of recent origin York City looks deserted. Early in the morning no other than those who count themselves among the mostly devoted readers are to be construct there, but Mario De Biasi is there too. He captures the readers' quiet passion and documents their consideration of pages and words, their motion towards concepts and knowledge. In the third image, the elderly master, De Chirico, the metaphysic painter who go intoed Italian art history in the mid-20th hundred sits on a comfortable chair flipping pages in a weight of peaceful concentration. The portrait is rich The head of the painter is appoint exactly in the center of a painted portrait behind him.

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These three images were all made through an acute seer of the 20th century--the tireless traveller of time and space and the photographer of one as well as the other common and prestigious people. His black and white images are of a time that has gone still contain a touch of the force of the future.

The photographs exhibited by means of Mario De Biasi in the exhibition Reading demonstrate a fascination with the world and a passion for it. De Biasi, along with Boubat, Cartier-Bresson, Gardin, and Riboud, was part of a generation of travelers and explorers who, during the last fifty years, trekk the whole world, looking for and capturing the hours of innumerable human lives, writing them in lines and regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements Their achievements consist of a lengthy visual ode to the hundred an initiatory journey.

Within the latitude of his career, the prolific Mario De Biasi has traveled the world, and smooth at the age of 80 he has no desire to cessation Through his long collaboration with Epoca, the Italian magazine, he is considered at many to be the father of photojournalism in his geographical division De Biasi has contributed greatly to the creation of a dynasty of young photographers working on the outside of their studios, with travel bags ready and cameras always in hand. Milanese by the agency of adoption, he left his beloved city a million times to overlay the major events of last hundred He, himself, has had to read between the lines of contemporary civilization and politics in order to understand the pure meaning of our time. Nothing better than the public indulging in reading could symbolize his possess attitude, his never-ending quest for information, his relentles curiosity.

Walking [i]or[/i] part of to the other the incredible surroundings of the Isabella diEste apartments at the Palazzo Ducale, with their luxurious plaster s and frescos, their decorated corridors and swings their floors and walls overlayed with Renaissance star dust, Mario De Biasi's images stand abroad as a distinctive, unfinished story. His photographs immortalize persons around the world caught in their pleasure of the pleasures of reading. From recently made known York to Rome, from Jerusalem to Tokyo, the ribbon of images unveils a unique attachment to the world itself. During his years with Epoca, Mario De Biasi captured the passions and pains, the attitude s of characters who made history. The exhibition brings seventy black and white vintage photographs of different sizes and proportions to Mantua--images pervaded from strong composition, graceful lines, and astonishing light. De Biasi has in no degree manipulated his prints, which makes his work extremely authentic and reveals the two his craftsmanship and his refined decisive vision. The photographer froze fractions of next to the firsts of multiple lives and brought them back for us intact. Tradition and modernity, history and to come share the walls here in Mantua.

In the catalogue of the present to view the curator of the exhibition, Maria Cristina Didero, writes about the discovery and power of the single image, of the "decisive moment" She underscores for what cause the exhibition should be considered as a thematic retrospective of Mario De Biasi's whole career. The theme of the point out "reading," is particularly timely in a world where highly technological media are increasingly being used as substitutes for printed materials. The exhibition, along with Giuliana Scime's body in the catalogue, illustrates readers' attachment to the word in print. Mario De Biasi's vintage photographs and the pages of the exhibition catalogue advocate a universal that Edward Steichen tried to define in images in his world-touring 1955 indicate The Family of Man--in spite of its diversities and discrepancies, the human race is common with the same needs and desires, the same daily occupations and pre-occupations.