Giuletta Masina in Fortunella by Eduardo De Filippo, 1958.
Photography Sergio Strizzi. Courtesy © Archivio Sergio Strizzi
Country
Presenting our next online exhibition courtesy of our friends at the Estorick Collection, one of the world’s foremost museums devoted to modern Italian art, located right here in London.
Currently the museum is exhibiting some 80 images by Sergio Strizzi (1931 - 2004), considered one of cinematic still photography’s greatest talents. After attending the exhibition recently, we are honoured to have been allowed to republish a few of our favourites alongside Curator Roberta Cremoncini’s introductory note.
Strizzi worked on film sets in Italy and beyond from the 1950s to the early 2000s alongside many of the country’s top film directors, including Antonioni and De Sica, as well as figures such as John Huston and Peter Greenaway. Strizzi was also set photographer for several James Bond films and later in his career worked with such greats as Benigni and Tornatore.
This exhibition, organised in collaboration with Rome’s Archivio Sergio Strizzi, comprises images in both black and white and colour spanning the photographer’s entire career, and is the first survey of his work in the UK.
With thanks to Roberta, Claudia and the entire Estorick team.
-- Anglo-Italian
Sergio Strizzi: The Perfect Moment
15 May 2024 - 8 September 2024
Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art
39a Canonbury Square
London
N1 2AN
Photography Sergio Strizzi. Courtesy © Archivio Sergio Strizzi
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
Photography by Sergio Strizzi. Courtesy © Archivio Sergio Strizzi
Photography by Sergio Strizzi. Courtesy © Archivio Sergio Strizzi
"Sergio explored faces, treating them as a painter might treat them, with lights and shadows...He threw himself into documenting the set, the camera and those moving it, the technicians and the crowd of extras. Sergio had a lot of sensitivity and taste; he was an artist."
— Francesco Rosi, Director
Photography by Sergio Strizzi. Courtesy © Archivio Sergio Strizzi
Photography by Sergio Strizzi. Courtesy © Archivio Sergio Strizzi
Photography by Sergio Strizzi. Courtesy © Archivio Sergio Strizzi
Photography by Sergio Strizzi. Courtesy © Archivio Sergio Strizzi