December 3rd 2011 – April 29 2012
Rome – Macro Testaccio La Palenda
Steve McCurry is not only one of the greatest masters of photography of our century, awarded several times with the World Press Photo Awards that can be considered as a sort of Nobel Prize of photography, but it is a point of reference even in Italy for a very wide audience, especially young people, who recognize his photographs in a way of looking at our time and, in a sense, “they recognize themselves.”
Born in Philadelphia in 1950, Steve McCurry soon begins to work as a photographer with a local newspaper. After three years he decided to travel toIndiaand composing his first real portfolio with pictures of the trip. After the publication of his first important work onAfghanistan, working with some of the most prestigious magazines: Time, Life, Newsweek, Geo and National Geographic. Sent to thousand fronts, from Beirut to Cambodia, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Steve McCurry has always went the front lines, risking his life to witness the effects and consequences of conflicts around the world. A member of Magnum since 1985, winning many awards news photos, Steve McCurry is the author of the report on the girl became famous icon of the Afghan conflict on the pages of National Geographic in the world.
Steve McCurry will be in Rome with a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, in the exhibition spaces of the MACRO Testaccio Pelanda. One of the most important protagonists of project and the culture of the image in Italy, Fabio Novembre, curator of the exhibition. The photos were chosen not with space-time criteria, but similarity of subjects and emotions, looking for common threads and unthinkable ties that bind people and places although in different latitudes. The exhibition is designed as a nomad village with a series of volumes that interpenetrate each other to restore that sense of humanity that be breathed in the McCurry’s photos.
The exhibition will include over 200 photographs: there will be some of the icons of McCurry, like the famous portrait of the Afghan girl with green eyes, taken during the more than 30 years of his extraordinary career as a photographer and reporter, but along with a selection of his repertoire will be presented for the first time the most recent works, from 2009 to 2011: the project with the last roll of the 32 images taken around the world using the latest film produced by Kodak, the last trip in Thailand and Burma with a spectacular series of images dedicated to Buddhism, an unpublished work on Cuba
There will be the whole story of the Afghan girl, with shots and never seen the material collected around the world by the same McCurry, who takes us through the story of what has become a real icon.
It will then be a selection of his “Italian pictures,” a magnificent tribute to Italy in the year celebrates its 150 th anniversary, the result of repeated stays this year in various cities and regions, from the Veneto Sicily, specifically for this event.
After letting us know the faces and the colors ofAfghanistan,Tibet and immense crossroads of peoples and cultures that is the East, we propose a Steve McCurry his gaze on Italy and Italians.
Rome Info 