THE 1950s-American stories of the great Magnum photographers
Place:Governor's palace
Hours: da mercoledì a domenica dalle 10.00 alle 19.00
Prices: Full price 8.00 €; reduced 6.00 € (university students aged 18-25 with university document and card; visitors with disabilities; agreements; school groups); free for children under 14; tourist guides with card; a companion for each group, including school ones; a companion for disabled people; journalists accredited by the press office of the exhibition organizers and the Municipality of Parma.
From 7 October to 10 December 2023, a photographic exhibition dedicated to the American culture of the 1950s, created through an exclusive selection of photographs curated by the Summer Jamboree from the Magnum Photos archive.
On display are famous and unpublished shots by Dennis Stock, Elliott Erwitt, Werner Bischof, Wayne Miller, Philippe Halsman, Inge Morath, Burt Glinn, Bob Henriques, Rene Burri, Cornell Capa, Leonard Freed, Erich Hartmann, Bruce Davidson, Eve Arnold: for the first time all these masters of photography together in an original project curated by Marco Minuz together with Summer Jamboree.
The exhibition “THE 1950s American stories of the great Magnum photographers” anticipates the first edition of the Winter Jamboree, a new Winter format organized by the Summer Jamboree, the largest international festival of American music and culture of the 40s and 50s in Europe, which will liven up the spaces of the Parma Fairs from 7 to 10 December 2023.
The exhibition was created with the aim of narrating, through images, the overwhelming American years, focusing on the essence of a happy but very complex decade. The exhibition brings together for the first time 82 shots taken by great photographers, members of the Magnum Photos agency active in the 1950s, artists who captured the spirit of the overseas society of those times, showing its beauty and the power of the transformations underway together with the profound contradictions that still characterized it, thus tracing a new map of American identity and exploring its social, cultural and economic dimensions.
The shots on display allow us to focus on the typical elements of that period such as the car industry, fashion, music, skyscrapers, large natural expanses, the role of women. However, each element is filtered by the desire to put the human being always at the centre and to talk about it. In the black and white of the photographs, in fact, the landscape takes a back seat, while the human element, the value of people and their gestures, emerges strengthened. What comes out is a cross-section of a society looking towards the future that leaves the war experience behind.
