The exhibition presents a selection of 30 original period photographs mostly unpublished by Giancolombo (1921 – 2005), protagonist of the Italian and European photojournalism of the second post-war period and founder of the Giancolombo News Photos Agency.

These are photographic services played between news and history and dedicated to the masters of the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century such as Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio De Chirico, Pablo Picasso and the fifties and sixties as Lucio Fontana and Georges Mathieu.
For the first time this year, as a tribute to Dalí, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his death, the sequence of the performance is presented, in the name of VITA = ARTE, held by the Spanish artist in ’61 at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice .
The photographs exhibited were taken in the international capitals of culture and worldliness between Italy, France and Spain. These are portraits of artists shot in the studio or in action, during official ceremonies or interludes played at friends’ houses, where the artists stage themselves and that artfully elevated photography stops and returns by filling the gap between the flow of the artist’s life and the formalization of the work of art.
The relationship between Giancolombo and Lucio Fontana, currently celebrated in the Metropolitan retrospective in New York, is a case in itself. For the Argentine-Milanese master, Giancolombo will produce the photographic documentation of the entire work from the fifties until 1968. Giancolombo, through photography, carries out a parallel reading of Fontana’s work moving between studies, courtyards, cuts and holes, through an interpretation that goes beyond the narrative aspects and offers new possibilities of vision and understanding.

Giancolombo (Gian Battista Colombo) was born in 1921 in Venice. Since his adolescence he became passionate about photography, his first shots as a boy are the roofs of Venice taken from the roof terrace of his home. While attending the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Padua, he must abandon his studies for the war front. After the end of the conflict he stops in Milan, where he comes into contact with journalism circles. In 1946 he was hired at “Il Corriere Lombardo” as a “reporter with a camera” and published his first photo, credited with a printing error which would give rise to the name with which he would sign his shots from that moment. But it was in 1947 that the United Press Photos asked Giancolombo to direct the photographic journalistic service for Northern Italy, while maintaining his collaboration with the Corriere Lombardo.
In 1949 Giancolombo founded the “Giancolombo News Photos“, his own agency, to which all major newspapers and weeklies are entrusted, not least Paris Match, for which Giancolombo deals with correspondence for Northern Italy. From here to oil stain in the subsequent luster, he collaborates with the most important photojournalistic agencies in the world. The Agency is at the height of development, Giancolombo’s services fill the pages of L’Europeo, Tempo, Settimo Giorno, Oggi, Gente, Epoca, The Hours of Saved Hair, Panorama; and abroad Paris Match, Life, Picture Post, Stern, Jours de France, Daily Express.
Having become famous for the inventiveness and timing of his scoops – the Bellentani crime at Villa d’Este, Churchill’s bath at the Lido, the Romanov-Gherardesca Wedding – Giancolombo, however, expresses its maximum versatility as a journalist like Tempo and The Italian illustration, with reportages that are the story of historical and daily moments of Italy and the world, the documentation of an epoch taken up with the artist’s eye.

Info: zero.eu/it/eventi/142815-scatto-allartista,bologna/