Mario Carrieri, one of the great Italian photographers of the second half of the twentieth century, has died

Born in Milan on 5 November 1932, son of the poet and art critic Raffaele, Mario Carrieri was hired at the beginning of the 1950s by Mondadori to deal with the cataloging of the photographic archive of the weekly “Epoca”, recently introduced on the market by the Milanese publisher. He spent the central period of the decade working on various advertising short films, partly broadcast by Rai during “Carosello”, obtaining recognition (the Grand Prize Diploma and the APC Cup) at the Advertising Film Festival of the Fiera Campionaria in 1956. In 1957 he abandoned all activities to dedicate himself to the development of a large photographic project on Milan, and between January and August of the following year he took 3,500 shots within the duty limit with a small format camera: 134 were chosen in 1959 to form the sequence, divided into ten scenes, of the volume “Milano, Italia”, published by CM Lerici and received by critics with substantial indifference. The only voice to firmly raise in his defense is that of another photographer, Ugo Mulas, whose intervention determines the beginning of a deep bond of friendship between the two. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and other European museums acquired numerous images from the volume for their collections.

Starting in 1962, Carrieri shot the material for “Cinque Dolori”, a short film freely inspired by the verses of the poet Eugenio Montale, over the course of two years. In the meantime, at the suggestion of Roberto Sanesi, he planned a documentary, never made, on the life and work of Dylan Thomas to be filmed in Wales, the poet’s birthplace. Fifteen years followed in which Amilcare Pizzi, a reference typographer for international art editions, commissioned Carrieri to take images from all over the world for a series sponsored by UNESCO on the artistic heritage of humanity. Of particular importance are those dedicated to ancient sculpture, from Etruscan to Greek, from Roman to Egyptian, for which he received a further commission from the Menil Foundation of Houston.

In the early 1970s Carrieri moved his business to the Milanese studio that had just been abandoned by Ugo Mulas, who was seriously ill, in via Spallanzani, and began an intense collaboration that lasted until recent times with the most important names in architecture, such as Aldo Rossi, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, Rem Koolhaas. He spent the weekends of the three-year period 1972-1974 in Venice, but of the over 17,000 color slides he made there he was unable to make the book he had originally imagined, disappointed by the discrepancy of the final photographic corpus compared to his expectations. Between 1975 and 1977 he created a long series of color and black and white images on African sculpture, exhibited in the first months of 1981 at the Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan and published, as well as in the exhibition catalog (Mazzotta) with an introduction by Emilio Tadini, in a special edition of “La mia Africa” ​​by Karen Blixen commissioned the same year by Olivetti. Starting in 1978 he worked on the theme of still life, completing a rich collection of works. At the end of the 1990s Carrieri dedicated himself to the photographic interpretation of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture. His images form an independent section of a traveling exhibition of the originals premiered in August 1999 in the Church of San Stae in Venice, and accompany the related volume “Rodin: Plasters and Bronzes” published by Robert Gordon and Gruppo Mondo Est. For over forty years he has dedicated himself to photographing flowers: in 2023 at the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan he presented the exhibition “Amati flowers”, with large-scale works of his artistic research dedicated to the theme of “tragic nature of human existence”.