A goodbye to Gabriele Basilico

Trained as an architect, Basilico soon abandoned the practice of architecture in the traditional sense, to take another way to read and interpret. The photograph thus becomes a tool to decode the essence in space, clarification of the elements that form, with a clear vision that seems to reflect the same clarity of thought. A thought that guides his different views, provided through the direct experience of the place, attentive to what communicates and reveals its complexity.

Gabriele Basilico was born in Milan, Italy (12 August 1944, ibidem, 13 February 2013). He has photographed all over Europe and the world, including a project commissioned by the French government to document changes in the national landscape in 1984 and a project photographing devastated Beirut in 1991. He was awarded the “Grand Prix International du Mois de La Photo” in 1990 and won the top prize for the Sixth Exhibition of Architecture of the Venice Biennial by the international jury. He has exhibited widely across Europe and the United States, including a retrospective of his work from 1984-1999 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2000 and a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008. He has published many books including “Porti di Mare” and “Berlin,” for which he was awarded the prize of the year's best photography book by PhotoEspagna in June of 2002.

His work can be found in the National Library of France, at the MAXXI in Rome, at the University of Palma and in various European and American museums.