I love Italy, which I've visited a few times for both work and pleasure, and the places I've been have been pretty much what you'd expect from the tourist brochures. Gondolas. Vespas. Golden light on terracotta. Well-dressed and immaculately styled people. All present and correct.
I admit, though, I've made little effort to visit the other side of the tracks. But that doesn't mean I'm not interested. And so a new show by Miron Zownir, the German-Ukrainian photographer dubbed "the poet of radical photography", definitely piqued my interest.
Titled simply Italy, the exhibition takes place at Galerie Bene Taschen in Cologne, Germany. Shot across cities across the north and south of Italy, as well as rural Apulia in the south-east, these images offer a window onto Italy's many and complex social realities.
If you know Zownir's work, you'll already have a good idea what that entails. If not, here's a quick primer.
AIDS, arrests and a trip to Hell
Born in Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany in 1953, Zownir took up photography in the late 1970s, at the height of the punk era. In 1980 he moved to the US, where he spent 15 years living in New York, LA and Pittsburgh, and his moody, expressionistic black-and-white pictures captured gay parties shortly before the AIDS crisis. Along the way he was arrested, censored and threatened more than once.
In 1995 he spent three months in Moscow photographing the homeless, the dying and the dead, an experience he described as "Dante's inferno". Since then his work has hung alongside Goya, Picasso and Cindy Sherman, appeared in Fotomuseum Winterthur's Darkside exhibitions and, in 2023, placed in direct dialogue with Otto Dix at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.
So how can we summarise his Italian photos? I'd say that above all, he's seeking to capture the gap between the image the country is selling and the life its people are actually living.
In Milan, a giant Dolce & Gabbana ad of a man in a wide-brimmed hat looms over an almost empty bar, with a lone drinker hunched at the counter. In Venice, a carnival reveller strides past the door of a Parisian jewellery boutique, while another frame shows a canal bridge and its lamps dissolving into fog.
In Florence, Zownir shoots the famous statues of the Piazza della Signoria from below, turning Hercules into a muscular black silhouette against the clouds, David reduced to a bystander. In Taranto, he finds a crumbling palazzo with huge eyes staring out from its empty window frames across a deserted square.
It's not all grim and negative, though. For instance, a shot of a young woman in Milan, all face piercings and leg tattoos, reflects the fascination with people outside the mainstream he's had since his punk days.
Indeed, Zownir himself would bristle at the idea that he's only interested in gloom. "What you might consider dark or grotesque might well be free, uncompromising, strange, tragic, unique, interesting or whatever," he once told Slow Travel Berlin. On this evidence, Italy has plenty of all of the above.
Italy runs at Galerie Bene Taschen, Lindenstrasse 19, Cologne, Germany, from Saturday, November 28, 2pm-6pm until Saturday, February 6.
