Images of religious ceremonies in Sicily, captured on location by the master of Italian photography.
Over the course of forty years, Gianni Berengo Gardin returned to Siciliy time and time again. Bypassing all elements of folklore, he was interested in a!ending religious events, in the Easters of resurrection, documenting the Sicilian people's relationship with the sacred. As a great master of photography, he captured the link between mourning and celebration to perfection, as well as that between devotion and curiosity, ever mindful to contextualise his subjects in the environment where such events unfold. His photos, rooted in his immersion in the crowd, render directly the sense of participation in those rites through the curious gaze of a photographer producing images not on commission but on his own initiative.
The images are accompanied by the words of Ferdinando Scianna, another master of photography, and anthropologist Franco La Cecla, who delves into the origins of such rituals.
Gianni Berengo Gardin (born 1930 in Santa Margherita Ligure) is considered one of the fathers of Italian photography. Raised in Venice, he began to devote himself to photography in the early 1950s, putting together a production of a monumental nature over the years. From the 1960s, he produced more than two hundred and fifty books, and his archive contains more than a million of negatives.
