GIANNI VOLPI
Modena 1946, May 31st.
Teacher of English Literature in Italian High Schools, also taking care of students during summer courses in England.
Professional photographer since 1976 always directing activity to fields where the human figure is always point of reference: FASHION, THEATRE, TOURISM, PORTRAIT, NUDE, REPORTAGE, wherever a gesture is expression of communication.
When I left teaching I took pleasure in shooting people in places. Their private intimate stories were supposed to become also mine.
Reality as just a docile pretext, a stage for my trips, either physical or mental. Other people, maybe, will follow the path, maybe to get to a different destination, it doesn’t matter. We have, anyhow, walked together for a while.
EXHIBITIONS AND GROUP SHOWS
2001 – From Face to Face. Photographs by Gianni Volpi
The exhibition “From Face to Face” opens on Thursday, March 15, 2001, at 6:00 PM in the Sala Grande of Palazzo S. Margherita. It features 150 images taken over two years by Modena-born photographer Gianni Volpi, dedicated to the “new faces” of Modena, the foreign citizens living in the area. The exhibition, organized by the Department of Culture, the Department of Social Services, and the Civic Gallery, aims to highlight the increasingly significant presence of citizens from other lands and cultures in the urban landscape. Above all, it aims to give these presences a face, a metaphorical voice, to the point of becoming, as Michele Smargiassi states in the exhibition catalog, a “carousel of possible existences, of the alternatives of a society that could be. But also an exact mirror of our real society.”
The exhibition will be open to the public in the Sala Grande of Palazzo Santa Margherita until Sunday, March 18th, after which it will be moved to the cloister of the same palace, with a strikingly dramatic installation.
On Saturday, March 17th, at 6:00 pm, the exhibition will culminate with a meeting with the author, attended by the Mayor of Modena, Giuliano Barbolini, Bishop Monsignor Benito Cocchi, journalist Michele Smargiassi, and the director of the Galleria Civica, Walter Guadagnini.
2014 – Modena and its photographers. From the Postwar Period to the 1990s
The second leg of the visual journey undertaken by Fondazione Fotografia to commemorate the most important chapters in the local history of photography, the exhibition presents some of the artists who, from the postwar period onward, have made Modena a key hub for artistic photography in Italy. Featuring approximately eighty works, the exhibition traces the career of photographers and the city’s cultural life, initially animated by the Sala di Cultura and later by the Galleria Civica di Modena, which dedicated ample space to the presentation of photography as a medium. The exhibition features photographs by Olivo Barbieri, Franco Fontana, Luigi Ghirri, Cesare Leonardi, and Franco Vaccari, alongside works by several artists equally instrumental in the development and dissemination of the new visual culture.