Farewell to Piergiorgio Branzi, photographer and RAI journalist who chronicled Russia and postwar Italy

Piergiorgio Branzi, a photographer and RAI journalist who chronicled the world with his shots, has died at the age of 93.

Born in Signa in 1928, Branzi began to devote himself to photography in the early 1950s. It was in the mid-1950s that he produced one of the most comprehensive reportages on social conditions in postwar Italy, following his trip to southern Italy in 1955. His first exhibition was in May 1953 in the Italian Photography Exhibition at the Vigna Nuova Gallery in Florence. In the 1960s he became a RAI journalist after collaborating with Mario Pannunzio’s Mondo.

Enzo Biagi sent him to Moscow, where Piergiorgio Branzi opened the first journalistic correspondence office of an Italian radio and television station. There he continued to take photographs, but then for the next 30 years, the Russian experience over, he abandoned photography.

He began shooting again once he retired. His shots have been exhibited in museums around the world. Influenced by the Tuscan figurative tradition, he preferred black and white: “I prefer black and white because in the 1950s, when I started, color was an expensive curiosity. But also because we Tuscans consider drawing the very ethics of all figurative expression.”

Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia, which holds his archive, recalled his passing in the words of Roberto Koch, founder of the publishing house and president of Forma: "Piergiorgio Branzi left us yesterday after a long and adventurous life. His turn of the eye, as we had called his retrospective book, has turned elsewhere. We accompanied him with great affection during the last two decades of his life. We send affectionate hugs to his wife Gloria and children Silvia and Simone.

Alessandra Mauro, from the introduction to Piergiorgio Branzi’s book Il giro dell’occhio: “He leads us, Piergiorgio Branzi, in a whirlwind of images and memories, of memories, impressions and thoughtful choices. Of consistent observations in which the gaze is always ready to travel the world, tracing and naming the vision of profiles of lands and stones. A series of views and ’reviews’ that communicate the author’s own existential experience, his breath. That of a profoundly attentive body, glad to continue to live by wonder and observation.”

Photo: Romano Gentile / Contrasto

Farewell to Piergiorgio Branzi, photographer and RAI journalist who chronicled Russia and postwar Italy

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