Archivio Gabriele Basilico
A digital space dedicated to the heritage of the Italian photographer, his work, vision and thoughts on photography
This site is the result of a huge work of selection, categorization and labelling done by Archivio Garbiele Basilico in collaboration with Jüniör (Ece Özdil), Giacomo Traldi and other contributors. The work of Basilico has been categorized and presented in a very rigorous way: hundreds of items like books, exhibitions and collections have been related to one another and to other parts of the site like the timeline of the photographer's life and his biography.
BOOKS
Books are a particularly important lens through which we look at Basilico's work, since most of his photographic projects were thought for this medium since their first conception. The archive contains about 115 books, thoroughly categorized and documented, with textual explanations and metadata like related books and exhibitions, year, publisher, contributors, languages.
EXHIBITIONS
During his life Basilico took part to more than 180 exhibitions worldwide. Each exhibition has been documented on the digital archive with images, textual description, collateral materials like pdf booklets or invitation, and again related items such as books and other exhibitions. It's possible to search and sort exhibitions by year, title, city and institution name.
TIMELINE
The section narrates the photographer's professional life year by year. The textual narration is enriched with pages of magazines, photographs (by colleagues and from his own work), links to related books and exhibitions. The right column gives a wider look on the world of photography to better contextualize the timeline.
Gabriele Basilico (Milan, 12 August 1944 – 13 February 2013) has been among the most influential Italian photographers and is considered one of the masters of Italian and European contemporary photography. In his vast body of work, that reflects on the transformation of urban areas in the industrial and postindustrial era, the theme of cities as complex and subtle products of economy and history occupies a central role.
Guided by a deep interest for architectural structures and for all artefacts that defined cities in time, he chose the rigour of the documentary style to narrate the constant process of stratification that shapes them, investigating the relation between people and constructed spaces for nearly forty years.
Using different methods but always loyal to the documentary style, he created an uninterrupted narration of places, exploring numerous European and international cities and in the meantime relating them to one another, returning the extraordinary complexity of the urban settings inhabited by contemporary society. In the years he built a compact and coherent method of photographic investigation, also thanks to his habits of going and returning to places, of observing the anthropized landscape, that influenced the vast area of contemporary photography that observes the transformations of the world.From an original text on archiviogabrielebasilico.it.