Luciano D'Alessandro. The Last Idealist

The photographs come from the Luciano D'Alessandro Archive kept since 2017 by the Studio Bibliografico Marini, in its Bari headquarters.

The exhibition, which traces, for the first time, around sixty years of photographic research by the Neapolitan photographer five years after his death, represents the first anthological exhibition after the prestigious exhibitions achieved in his lifetime: the collective exhibition at Camera 16 (Milan, 2010) with Lisetta Carmi and Mario Dondero, the 2009 retrospective at the Capodimonte Museum and the 2006 one at Villa Medici curated by A. Bonito Oliva, the group exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (2006) and at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2005).

The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections: "The Excluded", "Inside the Houses", "Inside Work", "Cholera in Naples" and "Earthquake in Irpinia". Each of these areas constitutes a different territory of photographic investigation capable of restoring the full awareness of an author and an intellectual who, like few others, was able to cross half a century without rhetoric but with the courage and obstinacy of the journalist, the observer, the ultimate idealist.

From the investigation into "Gli Esclusi" (1965-67) - the first real document on the silent condition of the mentally ill - to the photographs of "Dentro le case" (1977) and "Dentro il lavoro" (1979) taken with Gianni Berengo Gardin, as well as photojournalistic reports from Europe, Soviet Union and South America, for L'Espresso, Time, Daily Telegraph, Die Zeit, Le monde, L'Unità and Corriere, the photojournalist reveals his great sensitivity as a radical observer of marginality and forms of imprisonment, of collective utopias and their dissolution.
Naples, D'Alessandro's native and elective land, its people, its houses, are places of regeneration of the spirit, spaces of authenticity, where ritual models and anthropological paradigms persist, hidden in the stories of everyday life and simplicity. Not mere "tesserae" of the visible everyday, but polemic, warning, documentary evidence and in some cases, without any complicity, bitter memory.

The exhibition is also accompanied by the volume POSTCART EDIZIONI, edited by Roberto Lacarbonara, containing texts by the curator and contributions by two great friends and colleagues of Luciano D'Alessandro: Lisetta Carmi and Gianni Berengo Gardin.

The exhibition is promoted by Roma Culture, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali and produced by Studio Bibliografico Marini – Archivio Luciano D’Alessandro with the museum services of Zètema Progetto Cultura. Curated by Roberto Lacarbonara.