Gabriele Basilico

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Gallery Anne Barrault is very pleased to present an exceptional exhibition of Gabriele Basilico, with a set of photographs never shown in France. For this exhibition, Giovanna Calvenzi has gathered the photographs of three fundamental journeys for the artist,then 25 years old.

 

In 1969, Gabriele Basilico, an architecture student, travels through Scotland.
And he is still a student when he visits Iran in 1970, then Morocco in 1971. He has not yet made a choice between architecture and photography, two fields that fascinate him.
However, in a video interview recorded in 2012 by Amos Gitai, the Israeli film director, he says that while printing the images made in Glasgow, he realized that he might become a professional
photographer.
So, along three summer trips with his friends, he takes photographs as an amateur, though in different ways, according to the situations.
In Glasgow, he only makes about thirty images, which reflect his budding interest in urban landscape, but
mainly his knowledge of committed photography and of Bill Brandt’s lesson.
In Iran, he relates the magic scenery he drives through during his long journey from Italy to Persepolis. But
he also shows people, mosques, markets, pieces of architecture, having in mind the possibility of selling his images to a magazine.
On the contrary, for his journey though Morocco, he goes with the clear idea of making a travel impressions book (he did not achieve it), and structures his images by taking photographs of people, meetings, festivals, landscape, practicing a kind of “social photography”, but also attentive to the use of shadow, which begins to be his allmark.
Only the Glasgow images will be shown in the early seventies, in an exhibition at Il Diaframma Gallery in Milano.
He will put aside his first works, engaged in new plans and new projects. They will be rediscovered only in 2015, thanks to Humboldt publishers, with the publishing one after the other of his three precious “travel diaries”.