For the first time an exhibition on Alberto Di Lenardo, the photographer discovered after his death

From February 5 to May 8, 2022, the WeGil space in Rome, the cultural hub of the Lazio Region in the Trastevere area, will host the exhibition Alberto di Lenardo. The Unseen Gaze of a Great Italian Photographer, entirely dedicated to Alberto Di Leonardo (Ontagnano, 1930 - 2018), an author of the second half of the twentieth century who literally remained hidden in the attic and whose work will be offered to the public for the first time in this unprecedented exhibition.

The project is curated by Carlotta Di Lenardo, the photographer’s granddaughter, who unveiled his talent after his death in 2018, resulting in the volume An Attic Full of Trains, from the London-based publishing house MACK, in which a selection of the endless archive of images inherited from her grandfather is collected. The exhibition on display at WeGil is sponsored by the Lazio Region and is produced by LAZIOcrea in collaboration with Creation. A glimpse of our country’s past through the eyes of an author who remained unknown until his death. With this retrospective, the WeGil returns to host great photography but does so, this time, by focusing its lens on the hidden artistic heritage of our country.

Alberto di Lenardo. The Unseen Gaze of a Great Italian Photographer collects 154 images that tell a cross-section of the photographer’s personal life: beaches, mountains, bars, car trips captured in their most vivid colors and bearing the mark and beauty of time. In Alberto Di Lenardo’s shots one finds the poetry of feelings that cannot be expressed in words but which, through film, are fixed in a memory, sharing those same emotions that the photographer felt in showing his memories to his granddaughter.

Carlotta Di Lenardo tells how, when she was just 16 years old, during a family lunch, her grandfather wanted to talk to her about his great passion for photography, and share with her his archive of more than 10,000 shots. “My grandfather always loved to photograph and continued to do so throughout his life,” says the curator. “It was his way of communicating his feelings and allowed him to reveal emotions that his generation struggled to express in words. His images accurately reflect his inner serenity, a state of mind he always tried to convey to us, while at the same time manifesting his constant search for a stolen and never mundane shot. Indeed, he preferred his subjects to be almost always unaware of the camera, so that they would be spontaneous and real, a pure reflection of the moment. These images and the way he would get excited as he shared them with me, drawing them into his incredible and detailed memory, made me fall in love with photography and conditioned my entire working life in this field. Photography was something of our own, something he and I shared and jealously guarded.”

The exhibition project brings to the public an intimate and colorful portrait of Alberto Di Lenardo’s photographic work over more than 60 years. The exhibition is a truly unique opportunity to deliver a new name to the history of photography. In an era that sees the multiplication of exhibitions dedicated to the great masters or to the interpreters of visual art inspired by them, Alberto di Lenardo’s gaze emerges for his very personal style that sees the constant use of frames and windows that stop in time moments of lived life.

The exhibition is divided into three sections: in the first, the selection work done by Carlotta di Lenardo reveals a common aesthetic and reading of the world between her and her grandfather: an intimate narrative between the photographer’s gaze and that of her granddaughter. The second, more collected section includes somewhat autobiographical shots, with some black and white images taken by the photographer from the age of 18, a self-portrait and three portraits taken by the curator during a family lunch in 2013. Images that trace the author’s personal history and help to understand three fundamental aspects of Lenardo’s artist personality: austere, sunny and always self-deprecating. The third section is composed of 9 thematic walls that repropose recurring situations on which the photographer loved to point his lens and that therefore constantly recur throughout his archives: amusement parks, portraits of people sunbathing or looking at the horizon, roads and views from cars and airplanes, finally ending with some of the slides on which he used to write the word “END,” to indicate precisely, the end of a journey.

Biography of Alberto Di Lenardo

Alberto di Lenardo was born May 28, 1930, in Ontagnano, a village in the province of Udine, where his family’s country estate was located. He spent his adolescence between Trieste and Udine and then moved to Bologna because of the war. There, in August 1948, at the age of 18, he took his first photograph, inheriting this great passion from his father. In his diary he notes, “Bologna: view from my house in Viale Risorgimento. In the house opposite, on the top floor, lives a girl I would like to meet....”. From that moment he would never again part with his faithful camera, a Pentax that he would take with him everywhere, using it in every free moment, without a tripod, in search of the perfect moment, the right angle.

At the age of 24 he returned to Ontagnano with his parents and began working in the family business. In 1960 he met Maria Pia Rossaldi, the woman to whom he would remain bound for the rest of his life and by whom he would have two children. Having settled permanently in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, he never gave up his other great passion, travel, which took him to many corners of the world: the United States, Greece, Croatia, England, France, Spain, Egypt, Morocco, Brazil, the Czech Republic, the Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary. Seemingly austere and always wearing a jacket even on informal occasions, as if it were a uniform, Alberto did not talk much about his feelings, which he managed, however, to express through irony and self-mockery or with gestures, actions and through photography. Meticulous also in describing individual moments captured with the camera, tracing the emotions felt during the shot, Alberto fixed his memories in his memory.

In the last years of his life, having lost the physical mobility that had distinguished him, he began to slow down his photographic production, without ever stopping it altogether. Instead, he began to review and catalog his immense photographic archive, remembering what he had done but also what he could have done. Seduced by the technology of modern scanners, in 2006 he decided to scan all the slides and then naively throw them away, a testament to the fact that for him those shots were personal memories He became seriously ill in 2018 and passed away in June of the same year, at the age of 88.

)

Alberto Di Lenardo,

)

For the first time an exhibition on Alberto Di Lenardo, the photographer discovered after his death

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.