Italia

Italy of the late 1950s comes to life again in the neorealist as well as humanist street photographs of Magnum legend Thomas Hoepker. The beginning of a unique photographic career is now being published for the first time in a photo book by the Buchkunst Berlin publishing house! The then 19-year-old Thomas Hoepker traveled to Italy in 1956 and regularly in the following years to take photographs there with a Leica MP. His view is not that of a tourist, but that of an explorer. Clear, often cinematographic-looking compositions are created, which tell self-contained stories of encounters with people and their everyday rituals – with elements of compassion and humor. Hoepker photographed in the big cities, in Rome, Florence, Siena, Venice and Naples. He travels the south of Italy, Calabria and Sicily just as intensively. In these photographs, Hoepker finds a social perspective that will accompany and shape his work. His humanistic perspective and the cinematic-looking image compositions bring the photographs close to the neo-realist cinema of the time. And everything is entirely the Italy of those years, of the onset of mass tourism in the big cities accompanied by a certain modernization and the Italy of simplicity and poverty of the south, which he documented in detail on several trips. An attitude to life between awakening and tradition, an everyday kaleidoscope full of street scenes, religious processions or political demonstrations – everything becomes part of the narrative. During his trips to Italy between 1956 and 1959, he created a collection of more than 10,000 negatives, from which the book ITALIA presents an extensive selection of 124 photographs. In the photographs, which were taken in Italy between 1956 and 1959, Thomas Hoepker develops his photographic language and creates individual memory images. It is the beginning of a photographic career that lasts more than 6 decades, which allows him to travel the world and, via the magazines Stern and Geo, leads to full membership in the photo agency Magnum Photos in 1989. From 2003 to 2007 he is its president. The focus of all his images and reportages is man and his life in social communities. The photo book is accompanied by an insightful essay by author and director Raúl Morales Barcia, and an afterword by publisher and editor Thomas Gust.