Exhibition:
'Pearls of Photographic Publishing from Talbot to Camera Work
In collaboration with Collezione Dionisio Gavagnin
June, 2026
Without aiming to provide an exhaustive reconstruction of the history of the photobook, the exhibition “Pearls of Photographic Publishing from Talbot to Camera Work” presents 37 rare original photographs taken from publications that profoundly shaped modern visual culture.
The project highlights how photography revolutionized the relationship between image and knowledge. After centuries in which visual representation relied on engravings and drawings, the invention of photography in 1839 introduced a new language perceived as direct testimony of reality. Fundamental to this development was Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the calotype, which made the multiple reproduction of images possible and gave rise to the first photographic books in history, including “The Pencil of Nature.”
The exhibition then traces the development of photographic techniques and genres through works by major European and American pioneers: from archaeological explorations in the Middle East and the Mediterranean to documentation of the great world exhibitions, from war reportage to scientific, astronomical, and anthropological imagery. In doing so, it reveals the many roles photography assumed during the nineteenth century: artistic medium, historical document, scientific instrument, and vehicle for social information.
Ample space is also devoted to documentary and social photography, with images depicting urban living conditions in late nineteenth-century London and New York, as well as to Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of movement and the artistic experiments of Pictorialism and the avant-garde movements.
The exhibition concludes symbolically with a Futurist photograph by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, testifying to the transition from photography as a simple recording of reality to an autonomous language of twentieth-century artistic modernity.
