L'AQUILA BEFORE AND AFTER. Photos by Gianni Berengo Gardin

The moving story of the city of Aquila, before and after the earthquake, in an exhibition of a great master of photography three years after the tragedy of April 6, 2009.
Gianni Berengo Gardin’s relationship with L’Aquila began sixteen years ago, when he immortalized the city’s extraordinary architecture and the warmth of its people. Years later, the photographer returned to the scene to bear witness, once again through his photographs, to the city’s reduced state after the earthquake, to a paralyzed, wounded city, its historic center pierced by scaffolding, hidden by tarp and beams, streets that once teemed with sounds and with life, now deserted.
Beyond documenting L’Aquila’s decline after the quake, Berengo Gardin’s images draw the hard, inevitable comparison between before and after. A painful document, but one that is necessary for those in exile from their own lives, in an urban fabric that represents what is no longer there.
In the great tradition of the working photographer, Berengo Gardin employs his unique and classic style to draw a portrait that is sincere, vibrant, and acutely aware of the social reality of the wounded city that has become the symbol of our country. “The thing that’s most striking,” says the photographer, “is the silence in the streets. No one goes by; no one’s there. There are no children playing, no women shopping, no people going to the office. There were just four stray dogs roaming around. And I—I’m pretty old—I remember in Rome, how San Lorenzo was after the American bombing. I was fourteen years old, and it was the same thing. The stray dogs left wandering the city, the shored-up houses, and this deathly silence.”
The show will be accompanied by a text from Contrasto and One Group.