Sergio Strizzi: The Perfect Moment

For Sergio Strizzi, photography was not so much a profession as a vocation. Having found his métier at an early age, he cut his teeth as a reporter providing images to newspapers and magazines; yet it is undoubtedly his work on movie sets around the world for which he is most celebrated.

Never content to simply follow the instructions given to him by a director but driven instead by his own intuitive, creative response to the environments in which he found himself, Strizzi was nevertheless a humble man, despite being aware that certain of his images had achieved iconic status, and that many of those he collaborated with considered him to be an artist of equal stature to themselves.

Whilst chronicling almost half a century of international cinematic history, the images gathered together in this exhibition do not merely document for posterity those sets on which Strizzi was commissioned to work, but seem to tap into, and be pervaded by, the very spirit of the movies themselves. Running the gamut of moods from psychological intensity to playfulness, from sensuality to wonderment, these are images born of insatiable curiosity and marked by an innate sense of that ‘perfect moment’ which the artist honed during his years as a photojournalist, and from which this exhibition takes its name.

Many of these images encapsulate the spirit of the Dolce Vita era, and what is arguably the greatest period of Italian cinema, but the breadth of Strizzi’s photography encompasses so much more than the clichés.

— Roberta Cremoncini, Curator