(Finance) – One Sicily unpublished, dramatic and sweet goes on display in the halls of Palazzo Albergati in Bologna, from 9 June to 30 July 2023, through the photographs of Curtis Bill Pepperbrilliant American best-selling journalist and writer, correspondent of Newsweek and other prestigious US newspapers in the Rome of the postwarbut also an equally brilliant photographer, a “pupil” of his friend and mentor Henry Cartier Bresson.
The exhibition is promoted by Third Pillar Foundation – Internationalchaired by Prof. Avv. Emmanuele FM Emanuele, and is implemented by Poem SpA.
The 50 photographs exhibited have been carefully selected by his son John R. Pepper and by Angel Bucarelli among the many, still in negative or printed, taken on his travels between 1959 and 1961. These images in his projects had to be photographs of a anti-tourist guide, as he himself writes, “on a real Sicily, not that of well-known tourist resorts, not that of Greek ruins, nor that of the paved streets of the main cities of the island”. He unfortunately he will never realize it.
He claims Angel Bucarellico-curator of the exhibition together with John R. Pepper: “In these images it is possible to appreciate the synthesis talent of the great journalist, a professional of the word, and at the same time his capacity for visual, immediate narration, which is perceived with punctual intensity from the observer. Curtis Bill Pepper, in fact, handles the camera with lightning dexterity, managing to capture, always with great effectiveness, what the scene tells beyond objective reality. As Cartier Bresson taught him, he does not care of the academic technique, but, with impressionist and expressionist touches, he chooses unusual shots to get to clearly express and transmit the universal concept hidden in a gesture or a pose, of which the protagonists themselves are unaware.”.
Comment Prof. Immanuel EmmanuelPresident of the Third Pillar Foundation – International: “This exhibition is entirely dedicated to my homeland, Sicily, but presents a collection that is not made up of travel photographs, snapshots of tourist locations, pristine beaches or temple ruins Greeks: far from it. Pepper chose to immortalize what he called “the hidden face of Sicily”, hidden from tourists and travellers, but also from most of the Italians of that time. In fact, we see men, women and children, portrayed in flow of the daily life of the island, made up of moments of simple leisure, of peasant conviviality, of work in the fields or in the salt pans and of that – particularly hard and painful – in the sulfur mines.Stand out for their expressive power, among the various images, photographs that compare the persistence of the peasant tradition, immobile over time, with the representations of progress and optimism of Italy in the 1950s. “Viaggio in Sicilia 1959 – 1961″ is therefore, in my opinion, an exhibition that investigates the great themes of life through the power of images: an undertaking that requires an extraordinary sensitivity and narrative ability, two qualities that Pepper undoubtedly possessed”.
All 50 photographs that make up the exhibition they have no title, and were taken between 1959 and 1961 in various unrecognizable places in Sicily. Pepper used a Nikon F with a 50 mm lens to do this, with the use of a lunasix 3 exposure meter; the negative is the Kodak tri-X. The photos were printed in various formats on Ilford silver salts baryta paper and are all included in a 63 x 63 cm frame with passepartout. setup sober and elegant allows you to enjoy and appreciate Pepper’s images in an intimate emotion.