EUROPE '50
Foreword to the catalogue of the Foto& Photo Festival
by Enrica Viganò, exhibition curator.
Milan, 2002
If you hear him talk, it could have been yesterday: the freshness of his memories, joined to the enthusiasm for his stories, brings us back as if by magic to that time and that place whereof he was a witness.
Giancolombo’s words make his pictures become even more alive, if possible. But it’s in ‘narration by images’ that Giancolombo often reaches high levels of poetry through a formal refinement that sometimes threatens to overshadow what for him is still the primary function of photography, which is the function of documentation.
With the explicit purpose to document life in Europe of the post-war period, the photographer Giancolombo during the '50s travels far and wide in Italy and the neighbouring Countries, recording “simple” becoming. The exhibition Europa '50 is a collection of these images, extracted from the widest archives of Giancolombo Agency, that covered the news, the custom, the events and the celebrities of our history for over twenty years.
Giancolombo is a unique figure in the world of the Italian photojournalism: multifaceted photographer, master of famous reporters, experienced professional, breakthrough businessman, gentleman of the international high society, sensitive observer of life. Thanks to his pragmatism, he managed canalizing all his skills in a brilliant activity, conjugating high-life scoops, crime news and daily life. National and international magazines covers were conquered with portraits of great personalities, through adventurous surveillances, journalistic instinct, or great stroke of luck, as he admits. Ingenious and independent, he shared highlights with celebrated personalities in every field, from entertainment to politic, keeping always wide opened eyes on daily history.
It was intentional to reenact this double and intense activity in the exhibition, selecting the photographic prints amongst shots dedicated to common people, and documents (exposed in the showcases) between the reportages that caused sensation in those days. It seemed fundamental to try to give a coherence to the exhibition path, close calling a thousand temptations the Giancolombo Archives offered, and so renouncing to very many splendid images, in order to circumscribe the reading to some favorite topics.
The choice came along after discovering the intensity of the wide-scope reportages that Giancolombo personally realized in the '50. On assignment of the magazine “Illustrazione Italiana”, he hit towns and there he stuck around for long periods to be aware of the vibrations of the site, to let be stimulated by its drives and permeated from its atmospheres. He had to get “to feel” the place, he had to pick of the culture in all its expressions and there’s no disputing that he succeeded in it, watching the sailors on the bridge of Leningrad, the people crowding on the tram of Barcelona, the family walking in front of the Dome of Colony destroyed by the bombings and still the children
at the window in Dublin or the stonecutters’ lunch break
in Carrara: extracts of life, signs of the past, dreams of future in one of the historical moments richest in humanity and desire to reconstruct.
