Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

More than 100 images set up in the Sala Viscontea by Italo Lupi, friend and traveling companion of the great photographer

Milan, February 20 2020 - The Municipality of Milan pays homage with a major exhibition to Cesare Colombo, one of the most important photographers and scholars of photography of the twentieth century.
Curator of important exhibitions and organizer of debates, since the post-war period Cesare Colombo has contributed to the growth of photographic culture in Italy and today, thanks to 100 images, all Milanese, selected and donated to the Municipality of Milan by the heirs, responsible for the "Cesare Archive Colombo”, his great talent is on display in the exhibition “Cesare Colombo. Photographs/Photographs 1952-2012”.

The exhibition, curated by Silvia Paoli, head of the Civico Archivio Fotografico, with Sabina and Silvia Colombo, is set up in the Sala Viscontea by Italo Lupi, friend and traveling companion of the great photographer, and will remain open to the public with free admission until the 14th June 2020.

Almost forty years, a lifetime, dedicated by a photographer to seeing Milan, a great Italian city and at the same time a symbol of any great city in the world: this is what Corrado Stajano wrote in 1990 in the Alinari catalog which accompanied Cesare's first great Milanese exhibition Colombo, set up at the Arengario. After three decades, a new exhibition takes up and completes the legacy left to restore a new fresco of the photographic activity dedicated by Colombo to his city, in which the best-known photos are combined with unpublished images and actual archive rediscoveries.

The exhibition itinerary, divided into six sections, includes over 100 photographs in which Milan is described in its many cultural, political and social aspects and offers a vivid biographical story spanning sixty years (1952-2012) of urban development, transformations of work and changes in the social fabric. The world of factories and trade union demonstrations, student revolts and the suburbs; but also a careful look at a city in constant change, which produces and creates: fairs and shops, fashion and design, art and entertainment. Points of view of an 'inhabited' city by one of his most active interpreters.

The layout and graphics by Italo Lupi will help the visitor to reconstruct the figure of Cesare Colombo in all his complexity. On display, a "biographical table", twenty-five meters long, reconstructs the life of Cesare Colombo from his youthful education, to his first works, to his advertising communication projects, to his family life, to his many collaborations with publishing, to political commitment and his cultural commitments.
A very colorful fresco that counterbalances the rigor of the black and white photographs, flanked by another long table with more sober colors and graphics, with passages from his writings and quotes from different critical and literary texts.

The catalog edited by Silvia Paoli, published by Silvana (ita-eng) contains the curator's critical essay (Beyond the edges of the frame. Cesare Colombo 1935-2016, photographer, historian, critic), a section dedicated to the exhibition with a note by Italo Lupi and rich bio-bibliographic apparatus edited by Sofia Brugo. All the photographs are reproduced in the volume divided according to the sections of the exhibition: Metropolitan Album, Seasons of struggle, Job offers, Free entry, The city of fashion and design, Art on stage.

Photo gallery - Castello Sforzesco