Contrasto published True Photography which pursues a path at once thematic and philosophical to present a selection of some of Gianni Berengo Gardin's work that has narrated an era and built a vision stretching from Venice (his home town) in the 1950s right up to his most recent photographs portraying oversize cruise ships in the Lagoon.

True Photography is the seal of authenticity on the back of every one of Gianni Berengo Gardin's photographic prints, but more than anything, it is a key that helps us to realise just how "true" – as opposed to being what he would call "mere illustrations" – his images really are.  They are not the produce of elaborate manipulation, they are fragments of reality captured by an attentive and sympathetic eye.

With an introduction by Alessandra Mammì and Alessandra Mauro, the book contains twenty-four photographs chosen and commented on by a number of excellent witnesses to Berengo Gardin's work (intellectuals, colleagues, film-makers, architects and so forth).

Leafing through the pages of True Photography, one is not surprised to see that Salgado calls Berengo Gardin simply Gianni, christening him "the photographer of man", or that out of all his photographs, he should choose that of a working class family in Paris in the 1950s as being the most emblematic.  Nor is it suprising that a sociologist of the calibre of Domenico De Masi should consider a picture of workers seen from behind as they head for the factory to be a contemporary version of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's Fourth Estate.  And lastly, it comes as no surprise at all that so many leading intellectuals, artists and thinkers should all identify with Berengo Gardin's images, each with his or her own gaze, which inevitably generates other gazes in a plethora of visions, accounts, reflections and analyses on the way we are and the way we were.  The horror of asylums for the insane probed by Marco Bellocchio's lucid analysis, the beauty of a building under construction that enchants Renzo Piano, children's magical realism that Carlo Verdone finds so moving, or the reflections in the windows of a railway carriage confusing women's faces in a fade-out and prompting Alina Marazzi's narrative, are only a few examples of the response that the moment captured by his lens prompts in every observer.

Berengo Gardin's world is our world.  That is why film-makers and artists of differing inclinations and with differing careers were asked to observe his work, while his colleagues/photographers/friends were asked to decipher the profession and celebrated architects were called on to cast their gaze over the space and construction of his photographs.  Thus True Photography contains twenty-four significant testimonials from different worlds, disciplines and generations to confirm the timeless visual strength of a corpus of work that is anything but mere documentation.  This is History in the round, with a capital "H".

The volume is completed by an in-depth biography of Gianni Berengo Gardin and by different thematic sections offering a selection of photographs accompanied by short comments penned by Gianni Berengo Gardin himself (Venice, Milan, The World of Work, Lunatic Asylums, Gypsies, Protest, Recounting Italy, Portraits, Figures in the Foreground, The Home and the World, and From Landscapes to Oversize Cruise Ships.)

Paperback 25 x 25 cm.
64 pages
258 photographs in black and white
Euro 9.90