BRUNO BARBEY. The Italians

An intense and poetic visual tale, BRUNO BARBEY. The Italians offers a profound insight into Italy in the 1960s through the eyes of one of the greatest masters of 20th century photography. The exhibition offers a selection of about one hundred black and white photographsmade between 1962 and 1966, crossing the country from Milan to Palermoreturning the image of an Italy in transformation, suspended between tradition and modernityamong the wounds of war and the fervour of economic boom.

Bruno Barbey explored Italy in his Beetle, sensitively capturing every social and cultural nuance: workers, peasants, bourgeois, nuns, carabinieri, children and families alternate in a choral narrationsimilar to a modern Commedia dell'Arte. The exhibition, produced by Ares in collaboration with Magnum Photos and the Barbey Archiveis enriched by a video documentary by Caroline Thiénot-Barbey and by quotations from great personalities of the timewhich provide further historical and cultural context.

The exhibition is inspired by the book of the same name published by Contrast in 2022which for the first time collected this extraordinary reportage in its entirety, initially intended for the prestigious 'Encyclopédie essentielle' series of the French publisher Robert Delpire. Barbey's photographs are not simply images: they are X-rays of the Italian soulcapable of capturing the complexity and deep identity of a people.