The Modenese Photographic Collections, the result of Giuseppe Panini’s intensive collecting activity, offer an extraordinary visual heritage made up of images created by Emilian authors between 1860 and 1950 and entire photographic and documentary archives of various origins, starting with the material from the Modenese studios Orlandini, Bandieri, Giberti, whose activity lasted over a century. For completeness and variety, the postcard collection, one of the largest collections existing for the Modena area and province, and the Aeronautical Collection, where images and documents of pioneering aeronautics up to the end of World War I are preserved, are also noteworthy. The Collections also have a library with about 4,000 volumes and essays, both ancient and modern, on Modena, its province, and more generally, on photography. It also includes a periodicals section that houses newspapers published in Modena from the late eighteenth century until the 1950s and a large collection of specialized newspapers and magazines. In the permanent exhibition, original equipment and furnishings recreate the atmosphere of early twentieth-century photography studios and illustrate how work was carried out in Modenese workshops. In particular, the reconstruction of the Orlandini studio is presented, the most important and long-lived among the Modenese photographic studios, opened around 1879 by Pellegrino, who had previously worked as an itinerant photographer. Through a gallery of portraits selected from the Collections’ own archives, the journey continues by revisiting the history of photography from the first daguerreotypes to color printing, to capture the evolution of fashion and customs and highlight the changes that took place over a century and a half, with the development of new techniques and a variety of support materials. Urban and territorial transformations are also documented in a permanent exhibition section that tells, in its fundamental moments, the urban history of the city of Modena and its province. Completing and enriching the reconstruction of the evolutionary path of shooting techniques is a series of cameras forming the instrumental equipment of the three photographic studios mentioned above. Finally, of particular significance are the temporary exhibitions of absolute historical and artistic value, carried out in collaboration with other institutions in the world of photography and art throughout Europe, such as the exhibition “New York In and Out. The city of American photographers and Ferruccio Testi. 1880-1915” (2008), “Jindrich Štyrský. On the Needles of These Days” (2009), “Japan Contemporary” (2010), and “Yasuzo Nojima. A master of the Land of the Rising Sun between pictorialism and modernism” (2011), the first Italian retrospective dedicated to the master of Japanese pictorial photography. Other exhibitions include: “The Sorgato photographer entrepreneurs. The Modenese studio” (2008), “The Revealed Mountain. Nineteenth-century photographs from the Fineschi collection” (2009), “Never Seen Games” (2009), “Ethos of Italians – 1950s. Modena and the Italy of rebirth” (2009), “Days and Places. The San Paolo Educational Institution of Modena” (2010), “Salvatore Andreola and pictorialism” (2010), “1960s Modena and the Italy of the boom” (2010) and “Qajar Persia 1848-1864. Italian photographers in 19th century Iran” (2010).
Information about Giuseppe Panini Photomuseum
Via Giardini, 160,
41121 Modena (Modena)
059224418
info@fotomuseo.it
https://www.fotomuseo.it
Source: MIBACT
