Graziano Arici

Venice. World culture in the people

Graziano Arici from Venice is one of the most outstanding documentalist photographers and archivists of Italian culture. In 2012 he was the first photographer to be elected to Ateneo Veneto, a prestigious cultural society that has existed in Venice for the last 200 years. Arici’s photographs and reportages have been published in top international magazines. He has travelled extensively and documented the most important and interesting events right across Europe. In 1989 Arici produced a photo report on the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and in 1994 charted transformations taking place in the major art centres of East Germany. From 1995 to 1996 he travelled to Bosnia and Croatia, where he proved that culture and cinema are still alive, even in wartime.

The exhibition ‘Venice. World Culture in the People’ is dedicated to Arici’s native city and comprised of two parts showing his two roles, as photographer and collector of photography.

After qualifying as a sociologist Arici became fascinated by photography, and for several decades documented all the most important artistic and cultural events in Venice, including of course the Biennales of Art and Architecture. Over a period of many years Arici’s work consisted of an entire portrait gallery featuring the most celebrated artists and architects who came to Venice. His photographs portray Joseph Beuys and Harald Szeemann, Cindy Sherman and Rebecca Horn, Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Thanks to Graziano Arici we have images of the legendary ‘Knife Ship’ by Claes Oldenburg, and stills from the montage of Ilya Kabakov’s ‘Red Pavilion’.

Equally important in Graziano Arici’s life is his unique photo archive, to which the second part of the exhibition is devoted. Currently the archive contains approximately one million photographs, mainly works by unknown photographers, and Arici has painstakingly collected images of famous people on a visit to Venice. This is dominated by the stars of world cinema — Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Humphrey Bogart, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Romy Schneider, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. Arici’s photographs of Venice Film Festival soirées appear beside shots of demonstrations protesting against the festival. Despite the obvious prevalence of film celebrities, the archive compiled by Arici has preserved for us ‘Venetian’ portraits of Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky and Maria Callas; Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway and Françoise Sagan; Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Henry Moore and, of course, the great patron of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim.