Flavio Faganello: Work 1955-2005
Verona, Trento 2006
In collaboration with the "Scavi Scaligeri" International photography centre, Verona,
the Autonomous Province of Trento, and MART (the Museum of modern and contemporary art, Trento and Rovereto)
Curated by Roberto Festi. Catalogue published by Marsilio

Flavio Faganello (1933-2005) cut his teeth during the late 1950s in a region of Italy which had been the arena for a school of photography of the highest level. He was the most diligent and sensitive witness to the cultural landscapes of his native Trentino, dedicating himself for fifty years to a documentary effort which ventured from photography into pure ethnographic research, carried out with intense human sympathy. The exhibition was conceived by esaExpo as a tribute to one of the leading lights of twentieth-century Italian photography. It presented 180 photographs to visitors in Verona and Trento, spanning fifty years of his work. The original prints, all in black and white, are divided into eight sections tracing the key moments and dominant themes of the Trentino photographer's career: the beginnings, in the mid 1950s, with his images of Naples and Spain, and the subsequent photographs taken in Italy and beyond. Then there are the subjects closest to Faganello's heart, namely those associated with his region, Trentino-Alto Adige, which he studied in depth for several decades: portraits and country people at work; women and their role in mountain life; the natural landscape and the influence of Man; the "sequences", stories with which he emphasizes his role as a narrator, and finally, a group of ironic, disenchanted and sometimes bitter photographs providing a faithful evocation of his artist's spirit and sensitivity.