Carlo Mari. Io Milano

From 11 February to 11 April 2021, Gallerie d’Italia in Milan is hosting a temporary exhibition, Carlo Mari. Io Milano. Aprile 2020. La città vista dai Carabinieri attraverso l’occhio di un fotografo.

Displayed in the museum cloister, the exhibition presents 47 large prints of shots taken by Carlo Mari (also featured in the book of the same name published by Skira) and 2 fine art photos. The black and white images are a striking historical record and a touching portrait of a city brought to a complete standstill by the Covid-19 lockdown in April 2020.

Carlo Mari captures a city shrouded in silence as never before. Milan is seen through the eyes of the Carabinieri, a quiet, reassuring presence that accompanied the city through moments of difficulty and pain, capturing the desolation but also its surreal beauty.

An almost metaphysical Milan, seen in images by the great photographer. The city of finance, fashion and design stops and reflects: the black and white photos evoke the slowing down of time, but also hint at a city looking ahead to the future, ready to start again.

As familiar places reveal new guises through the images, the Carabinieri seem to be inviting us to meet one another again where they have always been present.

Biography

Carlo Mari is a news and advertising photographer. He has explored the world above and below the waves, his camera always around his neck ready to shoot. In the 1980s and 1990s he shot photo spreads and covers for leading Italian and international marine publications. For many years thereafter, he documented the wildlife of East Africa and was an envoy for The Harvill Press, London. This partnership led to two major works: The Great Migration and Pink Africa. He spends several months of the year in Africa, in close contact with its untainted nature and tribal peoples. As a portrait photographer, he has been capturing the outer – and inner – beauty of many tribes at risk of dying out. Carlo Mari has published a host of photographic books around the world, some charting life on the ocean floor, others on East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) and others still on the glamour of advertising. My Africa, one of his most important photographic books, was a best-seller in Germany in 2004. In 2019 Carlo Mari published Passage through Dar (Skira), with over 130 black and white images shot by the Italian photographer at Dar Es Salaam’s fish market.