Piero Marsili Libelli

Photography as performance

XII INTERNATIONAL MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN MOSCOW ‘PHOTOBIENNALE 2018’

Piero Marsili Libelli. Photography as performance

In the framework of Photobiennale 2018, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, is pleased to present the exhibition Photography as Performance by the Italian photographer Piero Marsili Libelli.

‘... I saw Antonioni’s film Blowup and decided to become a photographer’, recalls Piero Marsili Libelli. The movie’s main character made such a big impression on him that Piero Marsili bought a photo camera the next day and began to learn the basics of photography on his own. ‘I didn’t know what aperture, shutter speed, etc. were all about. I had to learn, and so I started buying specialized magazines’. Thanks to his obstinacy and tenacity, the young self-taught photographer soon found a job as a photojournalist for the crime column of Corriere della Sera, one of Milan’s leading newspapers.

In the eighties and nineties, Piero Marsili Libelli moved to Rome and began to work for the weekly magazine L’Espresso. He shot stories about the most important European cultural, artistic and theatrical events. Piero Marsili’s vivid, complex and provocative portraits of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Federico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni, and many others brought him well-earned renown. When Michelangelo Antonioni visited one of his first exhibitions, he was so impressed by the biography and work of the young photographer that he gave him the photo camera of David Bailey, the prototype of the main character of Blowup.

Libelli worked and was on friendly terms with many famous movie directors and actors, who willingly took part in his avant-garde performances and ironic staged photo shoots.

‘The places that I shoot are real, and so are the people. However, the reality that I represent is seen through the prism of theatre. This is the characteristic feature of my approach’, said Piero Marsili Libelli in an interview to the newspaper La Repubblica. There is something theatrical even about Piero Marsili’s war and documentary photo stories and fashion shoots, such as his photo report on the Romanian Revolution of 1989, his stories about Syrian refugees in the Balkans, his depictions of daily life in Mumbai, and his imaginary journey across the Salento Peninsula in Apulia, where he has lived since 2013.

Today, Piero Marsili Libelli’s work appears in the world’s most prestigious periodicals such as The New York Times, Newsweek, and Paris Match, while his exhibitions and performances are shown at leading international museums, galleries and theatres.