Curated by Denis Curti, in collaboration with Alessio Fusi and Alessandro Curti
Photography represents a language that guards the world, preserving memory, revealing transformations, restoring wounds, rebirths, changes, hopes. It is fascination, knowledge, lie and truth together, an instrument capable of telling what we have been, what we are and what we can become. It is the language of contemporaneity and, at the same time, the visual memory of humanity.
From this awareness comes the photographic exhibition “100 Photographs to Inherit the World,” which takes the form not of a simple anthology of masterpieces, but an itinerary that invites reflection on the visual and cultural legacy that photography has passed on to us. The concept of “inheriting the world,” hence the exhibition’s subtitle, translates into a reflection on our time: a complex present, traversed by technological transformations, environmental crises, hybrid conflicts, new identities, and an unprecedented visual saturation. In this scenario, photography becomes a tool for orientation, for building awareness, for finding a place in collective memory. The selection of the 100 photographs – a necessary choice to circumscribe a vast visual territory – does not respond to hierarchies between historical, aesthetic, political or cultural values: each image is part of a unique collective heritage. The curatorial choice thus defines a journey through human history through what photography has been able to see, preserve and transform.
Structured in six sections, the exhibition spans two centuries in the history of photography, from the earliest experiments, including the magic lantern and daguerreotypes, to the transition into modernity, when photography ceased to be a simple witness to reality and became a territory of invention thanks to the twentieth-century avant-garde movements, with figures such as Man Ray, Aleksandr Rodčenko, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Philippe Halsman, alongside the poetic quests of Mario Giacomelli and the conceptual provocations of Joan Fontcuberta.
From here, a broader narrative unfolds, in which photography becomes memory, introspection, metaphor and a glimpse of the future, with images that have marked contemporary history-including Joel Meyerowitz ‘s photographs at Ground Zero-revealing the power of the photographer as the “eye of the world,” capable of transforming momentous events into collective memory. In parallel, the exhibition highlights how authors such as Claude Cahun, Pierre Molinier and Robert Mapplethorpe have instead transformed photography into an intimate diary, making the image a site of psychological and symbolic introspection.
The language of photography then opens up to the evocative dimension, where the real is reinvented through fiction and staging, with the visions of Newsha Tavakolian, Sandy Skoglund, Nancy Burson, David LaChapelle and Mat Collishaw, who show a photography capable of becoming metaphor, visionary tale and ethical reflection.
Finally, contemporary authors propose new imaginaries of the 21st century world, directly and radically addressing the issues that define our time: multiculturalism, gender issues, migration, civil conflicts, environmental crisis, and new models of belonging. The works of Ebrahim Noroozi, Carlos Ayest, Guillaume Bression, Gohar Dashti, Alba Zari and Carlos Idun Tawiah thus render an unstable and hyper-connected present, where real and post-digital intertwine to imagine new possibilities.
The exhibition is produced by 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo Il Sole 24 ORE and supported by Zurich as Main Sponsor and Turisanda1924 exclusive travel brand of Alpitour World as Sponsor.
