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Matinee: Massimo Piersanti
18 March 2023
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 492nd in our series of Saturday matinees today: Massimo Piersanti.
This 11:37 video from Bibliotheca Hertziana focuses on Italian photographer Massimo Piersanti, who passed away last month at the age of 84. The video explores Piersanti's documentation of "artistic and curatorial experiences, highlighting the international exhibition Contemporanea, held in the underground parking garage of Rome's Villa Borghese in 1973."
The museum's exhibit Massimo Piersanti and the Incontri Internazionali D'Arte curated by Maria Giovanna Virga, which closed in February, includes many of the images in the video and a few more of Piersanti's work.
Born in Rome in 1939, Piersanti spent his youth between Naples, Neuchatel and London before returning to the capital in 1967 to devote himself to photography. He taught himself the craft.
"I was fussy, I started reading all the books on development, color, contrast, techniques," he said. "I also worked a lot with the optical bench and great precision is needed there.
"Among the Italian photographers I had a preference for Piergiorgio Branzi, who proposed a grainier and more animated image. But it is above all William Klein that I loved. It was a slap in the face to see his photos. This led me to explore the Japanese, Daido Moriyama and Provoke magazine of which only three issues came out between 1968 and 1969."
He began his career as an architectural photographer, branching out into cinema before concentrating on advertising photography. His clients included General Motors, Esso, Frau, Alitalia, FIAT, Renault, Honda, Jaguar, Valtur and Motorola.
He became the official photographer of the Incontri Internazionali d'Arte in 1971 after finishing the photographic documentation of the exhibition Vitality of the negative in Italian art 1960/1970 at Palazzo delle Esposizion that had already been started by Ugo Mulas.
He continued to document other important exhibitions until his death.
To document Contemporanea in a newly-built Roman parking garage with insufficient lighting, he describes in this clip how he used a Nikon and 20mm lens, pressing the camera body against the wall to stabilize the long exposures.
The exhibit featured the young Christo's wrapping of the Porta Pinciana to inaugurate the second phase of Contemporanea. "It was the real entry point to the exhibition," Piersanti says.
The Hertziana has specialized in ancient art history but recently has launched an initiative into modern art and began a major digitization project of its photographic collections in February, which includes Piersanti's archives.