“Even when you shoot a scene it can be off set, because I have a broader space than a movie camera”
The exhibition showcases a selection of approximately sixty photographs – many of them on display for the very first time – taken by the celebrated Italian photographer Sergio Strizzi from the 1950s to the year 2000. Strizzi’s camera immortalised the great stars of the cinema, some of his photographs even acquiring iconic status and replacing the film itself in people’s imagination.
The exhibition is broken down into three major thematic areas comprising: a series of previously unpublished photographs from the reportage on Monica Vitti that Strizzi produced at Torre Galfa in Milan in 1960; a selection of portraits of leading movie personalities such as actors, actresses and directors surprised during the production of a film, that reveal the most important quality of a set photographer, namely the ability to make himself invisible; and a number of backstage photographs that capture the atmosphere that permeated film sets in the past with extraordinary vibrancy, from Sophia Loren surrounded by a crowd while filming Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples) in 1954 and photographs taken on the set of some of the films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in the early 1960s, such as La Notte (The Night), L’Eclisse(The Eclipse) and Deserto rosso (Red Desert), to others taken on the set of Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) in 1997.