The exhibition
VISION – gathers more than 100 of the most inspiring men and women of the 20th century. Dancers, physicist, prime ministers, revolutionary, divers, cooks, opera singers, authors, priest…… The exhibition explores every possible activity of mankind through the eyes of the ones who acted and thought in the deepest way.
The exhibition is composed with giant pictures (black and white portraits and colored iris) of these people diepatched in 15 rooms on the second floor of the Procuratie Vecchie. Extensive captions explain the life and impact of every person presented, meanwhile a selection of quotes from these people invite the visitor to take a break and meditate.
Francis Giacobetti says :
Thirty years of my life for a dialogue with the horizon… Flemming, Darwin, Mozart, Michelangelo, Marie Curie are identical to Crick and Watson who discovered DNA, to Francis Bacon, Federico Fellini, Kurosawa, and all the others who honor these pages.
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It has been my privilege to meet them, to have planted a mimosa tree in Cuba with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to have been the Dalai Lama’s guest at his home in Dharamsala, to have visited Rome with Federico Fellini, among so many other moments. Without the two hundred women and men in this project, if they had never existed, we would still be between the Stone Age and the quest for fire. Considering there are more atoms in a drop of water than stars in the universe, how lucky I have been to mix with angels.
Thie exhibition is a song, a poem to praise gods and heroes. I have been asked: “Are those really their eyes?” The answer is “yes.” A black and white portrait, a colored iris, planets. The light of men, an idea I owe to a woman, I thank her for this.
Biography
Francis Giacobetti is an exception among major artists who are internationally renowned for their fashion photography. First because of the sheer variety of his work: photojournalism, fashion, nudes, portraits, all at a same level of excellence; also for the privacy that surrounds him.
He first ventured into photojournalism with French weekly news magazine Paris Match. He soon realized he preferred portraits and the encounter between two individuals to the adrenaline of photojournalism. For 25 years he was the artistic director of LUI, at the time a magazine of irreverent content and insolent success with its monthly circulation of a million copies. With Life, Paris Match, Télé 7 jours from A to Z, Look, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Lui, Francis Giacobetti contributed to the rise of photography magazines.
He established his reputation in 1971 and 1972 by directing for two consecutive years the famous Pirelli calendar that only the greatest names in nude photography get to work on. He never let this go to his head, and reinvented nude photography in his Zebra series, a play on lines and light, where a shadow creates volume and eclipses flesh in a streak of darkness. Great female icons have trusted him, the master of light, to make photos that have become iconic: Mireille Darc, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, Carla Bruni…
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His remarkable lines contributed to collections by Japanese designer Issey Miyake, who gave him carte blanche to illustrate his collections for 20 years.
About forty years ago, Francis Giacobetti developed a new approach for a now legendary series. He clearly saw the triptych: a black and white portrait and a colored iris. The first on the list was the Dalai Lama in the late 1980s. “No one could refuse after him! The project then picked up vertiginous speed. The more examples you had, the easier it was to convince others.”
More than thirty years later, the result is this exhibition : VISION – Master Minds of our Time.
