Photography buffs can enjoy two major exhibitions opening on Friday at the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice. The first is a show of previously unpublished pictures by Ferdinando Scianna of the Jewish Ghetto in the lagoon city to mark the 500th anniversary of its foundation. The Sicilian photographer has realised a photographic reportage focusing on daily life in the Ghetto that also includes portraits and pictures of architectural details, domestic interiors and places of worship. In it, the symbolic, historical and ritual dimension linked to places and gestures and the present and ordinary coexist.
The second exhibition is a show of photographs by René Burri dedicated to 20th century architecture and its protagonists. 'René Burri. Utopia' running until January 8, 2017, brings together over 100 photographs by the Swiss artist who died in 2014 and who was president of the prestigious Magnum photographic agency in 1982. The shots are inspired largely by the architectural solutions conceived by the masters of his time, and reflect the need to narrate the processes of transformation and historical, political and cultural change underway during the last century.
The exhibition has been organised to coincide with the 2016 architecture biennale in Venice in recognition of Burri's vision of architecture as a political and social operation able to convey and impose a world view. The photographer travelled between Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America in the footsteps of the great architects of the 20th century, from Le Corbusier to Oscar Niemeyer, from Mario Botta to Renzo Piano, from Tadao Ando to Richard Meier.
Their portraits and photographs of their constructions are accompanied by images of key historical events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the protests in Beijing's Tienanmen Square. Instead the recent production of Sergio Staino takes centre stage at Palazzo dell'Abbondanza in Massa Marittima in the Tuscan province of Grosseto until September 11. The exhibition presents the work of the illustrator and cartoonist from 2000, when problems of eyesight forced him to abandon sketching in favour of digital technologies. His subjects include acrobats, knights, princesses, animals and nature drawn from imagination and observation. Photo: snap of Venice by Scianna
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