Farewell to Gianni Berengo Gardin, 'engagé' photographer full of vivid humanity

In his shots he invariably exuded all his commitment as a engaged photographer and his vitality was proverbial until his final years. Gianni Berengo Gardin died yesterday at almost 95 years of age. Of him remains and will remain the unshaken lesson that made history in our country and beyond. He was born in Santa Margherita Ligure in 1930, and his civil testimony, as much as his art, has never failed. And it would suffice to think of his Venetian works of just over ten years ago, with the immense monsters that ploughed through the Lagoon, stopped in rigorous black and white, in their mastodontic "cruising horror vacui" that obscured everything, to confirm his mark and the mark of a great master. Yet 'I am not an artist,' he would assertively repeat, 'I am not an artist, I am a photographer, very proud to be one, I do documentation work, I am a witness of my era and nothing more'.

As for the documentary filmmaker, there is no doubt that he was one: citing Morire di classe, the book that immortalised the condition of Italian asylums in the 1960s, and which, with the precious help of his friend Carla Cerati, played a decisive role in Franco Basaglia's psychiatric reform, is a must, to describe not only his poetics, but the civil duty that has always been very much alive in him. Those shots taken in Gorizia, Colorno, Florence and Ferrara marked an epoch and, if padlocks and restraints are only a distant memory for us, we owe it also to his visual storytelling, with that lens, never sidelong and devoid of easy subterfuge, placed at the service of society and history. Yet Berengo Gardin's denunciation, dense and crude, rough as Ligurians can be, even sharp, did not take anything away from the great humanity that peeped out, shone through in his work, tinged with gentleness, and never nourished by pretence. Because the Ligurian photographer should not be forgotten, he was also a convinced and assertive revolutionary, without ever betraying his ideas, just as of commitment and civil testimony was the work of John Dos Passos, a much-loved writer. If his works dedicated to the landscape, in the grand angle, were striking for their rigour and descriptive clarity, in recounting a minor and often unknown Italy, he made legions of travellers fall in love with him, enchanted by his critical outlook and, at the same time, endowed with a discreet and light emotionality, certainly a unicum.

It is impossible here not to mention that his black and whites have conquered the most noble museums and exhibition spaces, from the MoMa in New York to the National Library in Paris and, since 1994, his photos have been included in the exhibition dedicated to Italian Art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His epoch-making reportages were hosted by Mario Pannunzio's 'Mondo' as well as by the most prestigious newspapers, 'Epoca' and 'Time' among others, because his social investigation was internationally recognised as indispensable. Iconic, I would say. And yet, for me as a Sardinian, it is his Reportage in Sardinia, taken on several occasions for the Touring Club, that makes the difference in his vast poetics: in those shots, like no one else, he summed up the history of an entire island at the crossroads and of its people bewildered between past and present; his acumen dug as never before, without filters or clichés, into the realities of those last, of those common people, whom the 'Continent' did not know, or only pretended not to know, far beyond the coastal destruction that would bring about its false limelight. We will miss his direct gaze and his frankness. Today more than ever.