| There is the activity as a reporter,
the touching chronicle of a world in a chaotic evolution, but there are
also the keen social analysis, the civil charge made through the pictures
of poor and humble people, as a symptom of his personal tragic feelings,
even when they disguised as a scientific document. There is also, without
any contradiction with the clear realistic attitude of the author, his
subtile formal research, which freely alternates the poetry of instant
dècisif dear to Cartier-Bresson with the long poses, the refined
shots, the isolated images and the para-cinematographic sequences, always
scrupolous in the rendering of tones, details and composition balances.
In reality, Pinna interpreted photojournalism as totally related with life,
without conceiving any sectorialism or market labels, fit only for the
conformist scholars. Pinna is not an anthropologist, nor a "paparazzo",
nor a political militant, nor a studio photographer, even if at the end
he can be each one of these things. He is rather a full range photographer,
who used the mechanical device as a means to reflect upon things, indispensable
to grasp and to fix the secret of an fading reality in its contrasting
variety. The lens is the natural appendage of a very curious eye, which
obstinately keeps on searching in the form of the events a meaning, a story,
the thread of a truth which the photographer look at as a witness.
The first anthological exhibition dedicated to Franco
Pinna, result of a research led by Giuseppe Pinna for the Istituto
di Studi Scientifici/Archivio Franco Pinna, has the ambition
of being an event that contributes to the rediscovery of an artistic personality
of undoubted weight. The critical results of this study, based on a very
accurate philological research that has considered more than 250,000 pieces
among photographic, bibliographic and archive materials, have reconstructed
a definitive portrait of Pinna's photojournalistic activity. The research
besides has clearyfied new aspects of Pinna's cultural influences (the
friendship with Franco Cagnetta, a pioneer in anthropology and anthropological
photography in Italy) and his technical and formal interests, such as the
early specialization in colour photography, in the photo-documentary and
in the use of special sizes as the panoramic size.
The exhibition, sponsorized, organized and produced by
the Istituto di Studi Scientifici/Archivio Franco
Pinna, presented in Naples (1996) in the prestigious historical
place of the Maschio Angioino, and then in Cagliari (1997), is here presented
in its "virtual" version for the opening of the Pressphotoitalia/Galleryonline©
activities.
A selection of pictures from the
exhibition (40 pieces) was presented in november 1998 inside the fair
Paris Photo.
The Photographs and
Other Materials
The photographs of the exhibition (more than 200, in
black and white and colour), the result of an accurate selection from a
little less than 250,000 images, are almost entirely unpublished and for
the most part coming from the Pinna archives in Rome, and from the archives
of the reviews "Noi Donne", "Vie Nuove", "Epoca" and of the Tourist Office
of Bologna. |
