Urban, natural, human and imaginary. These are the four takes on the idea of landscape in Italian photography over the past 70 years that emerge in the exhibition on show at Palazzo Santa Margherita from Friday 14 February: 114 works by 87 of the most representative photographers on the Italian art scene. On view until 4 May, the exhibition “Passaggi Paesaggi. Fotografia italiana dalle collezioni di Fondazione Ago”, curated by Chiara Dall'Olio and Daniele De Luigi, ranges from the maestros of the twentieth century to the generation of artists emerging in the last decade. The works come from the photography collections of Fondazione di Modena and the municipality of Modena’s Galleria Civica, which together make up one of Italy’s most significant institutional heritages. 

The urban landscapes of the maestros (Luigi Ghirri, Gabriele Basilico, Guido Guidi, Olivo Barbieri and Mimmo Jodice) flow past images dominated by nature and its complex relationship with humans (Franco Fontana, Walter Niedermayr, Paola De Pietri, Mario Giacomelli and Luca Andreoni), while human landscapes range from reportage (Gianni Berengo Gardin and Ferdinando Scianna) to anthropological investigation (Mario Cresci and Franco Vaccari), portraits and cinema (Tazio Secchiaroli and Marcello Geppetti). Imaginary landscapes then embody experimental research on photographic language, taking viewers to the terrain of abstraction and performance (Rachele Maistrello, Paolo Gioli and Cesare Leonardi). Starting from traditional veduta depictions of the landscape [paesaggio] – found not only in the history of Italian photography but also in the collections themselves, owing to the role historically played by Modena and Emilia-Romagna in the evolution of this genre –  as the curators explain, we can trace a series of passages [passaggi]: from the maestros to the latest generation, from analogical to digital, from one genre to another and beyond, reflecting on the medium and searching for its boundaries. These passages take visitors through the exhibition and the rich artistic scope of Italian photography, enabling lines of past and future evolutions to be drawn.