01 / 03

South-East

This unique exhibition is devoted to 30 years of Steve McCurry's career. The exhibition proposes an exceptional collection of more than 200 photographs. Created for Milan by a Milanese team, the exhibition is a series of the journeys that Steve McCurry has undertaken over the past 3 decades.

"The sequence of images presented in the SUD-EST exhibition" - says Steve McCurry - "is suggestive of the vast tapestry of human experience and my chance encounters with silhouette and shadow, water and light, spire and sky. I wanted to create for the viewer the visceral sense of beauty and wonder that I'm confronted with during my travels, when the surprise of the strange rubs against the delight of the familiar".

The 200 photographs break with traditional methods of presenting an exhibition. Instead, the layout design by Peter Bottazzi proposes metaphorical branches of trees in an installation specially devised for Palazzo della Ragione, a unique space in the centre of Milan, the headquarters of the Municipal Authority devoted to photographic exhibitions.

The exhibition of SUD-EST is composed of six sections.

In Portraits, we find a selection of the portraits that McCurry considers essential to his story. Through them, viewers immediately encounter the beauty, the elegance, the dignity of the portraits and are suddenly projected into a relationship with the "other". McCurry's images have always highlighted the essential value of human dignity.

In Silence and Travel, the supporting theme is the journey through cultures and silence. McCurry's photographs portray people in prayer, scenarios of silence, but also the amazement before the relationship of the human being with the absolute. "My life" - says Steve McCurry, "is shaped by the urgent need to wander and to observe, and the camera is my passport. This is the result of my restless curiosity: a selection of moments I have been fortunate enough to witness".

In the third section, War, we reach the heart of the exhibition. The day after returning from a trip to Tibet on 10 September 2001, from the window of his studio in New York, Steve McCurry witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers. A sudden and shocking change: from the silence of the meeting with the Dalai Lama to the horrifying scene of the collapse of the towers. The pain is transfigured by the harmony of the images. Beauty and tragedy are interwoven.

In Joy and Life, McCurry's photographs immortalise scenes of joy, from which life flows.

The fifth section, Children, makes visitors reflect on one of the most dramatic themes in the history of humanity: the exploitation of the very young, with child soldiers as its most extreme form.

The exhibition concludes with the section entitled Beauty. Here we find three images, one of which is the famous photograph of the Afghan girl with green eyes that has now become an icon of contemporary photography. The other two are also portraits (an Afghan student with books in her hand and an Afghan girl with a green shawl), that document two other female icons of our time through the work of McCurry.

Three further photographic sections will be presented in the exhibition, constructed as "short films", with a non-stop sequence of photographs that compose three different stories: Monsoons, Aids, Portraits.