Gianni Berengo Gardin (10 October 1930 – 6 August 2025) was an Italian photographer who concentrated on reportage and editorial work, but whose career as a photographer encompassed book illustration and advertising.
"Undoubtedly the most important photographer in Italy in the latter part of the 20th century", "[f]or more than fifty years Gianni Berengo Gardin has been taking photographs with the humility and passion of a great craftsman."Roberto Koch, ed., "Gianni Berengo Gardin"; in Photo Box: Bringing the Great Photographers into Focus (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009; ), p.254).
Life and career Born in Santa Margherita Ligure on 10 October 1930, Berengo Gardin lived in Switzerland, Rome, Paris, and Venice before starting as an amateur photographer in 1954. As a photographer, he was self-taught, learning photography from the two years he spent in Paris working with other photographers.
In Berengo Gardin's first year as a photographer, 1954, his first photographs were published in Il Mondo. This magazine, edited by Mario Pannunzio, was one to which both amateurs and professionals liked to submit their work, although until 1959 the photographs were not attributed to particular photographers. It "pursued a photographic aesthetic that privileged street scenes and odd, ironic or bizarre encounters in both town and country", and "more than a third of the photographs published in Il Mondo were by [Berengo Gardin]." His "rare capacity for capturing simultaneous actions and objects within the same frame positioned him as an excellent candidate for that street life Pannunzio was after." Berengo Gardin would later have photo essays published in Domus, Epoca, l'Espresso, Stern, Time, Vogue Italia; Réalités; Le Figaro; and La Repubblica.
He turned professional in 1962 and two years later moved to Milan, where he lived from 1975 onwards.
From 1966 to 1983, Berengo Gardin worked with Touring Club Italiano, providing much or all of the photography for books about regions of Italy and other European countries or their cities: he once identified the high point of his career as "The work I did in Great Britain, for the Touring Club in 1978" (adding that "I loved the cars: I had an Austin and an MG"). He did similar work for the publisher Istituto Geografico De Agostini (later De Agostini Publishing). In 1979 Berengo Gardin started to work with Renzo Piano, photographing the process of designing his buildings. Berengo Gardin also worked with major Italian firms – Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Italsider (later Ilva), Olivetti and others – showing the working life of employees, rather than the products.
In the early 1990s, Berengo Gardin spent time living among the Romani people (Zingari) of Italy, hoping to show their lives from the inside. This resulted in two highly regarded books, La disperata allegria (Florence) and Zingari a Palermo (1994 and 1997).
From 1990, Berengo Gardin was represented by Contrasto.
Berengo Gardin remained active in his eighties. An assignment, from la Repubblica, was to photograph the giant cruise ships that threaten the ecosystem of Venice.Jordan G. Teicher, "Are these giant cruise ships destroying Venice?", Slate, 20 December 2015.
Berengo Gardin had a large archive, with over 1.5 million negatives. The FORMA Foundation (Fondazione FORMA per la Fotografia, an offshoot of Contrasto), in Milan, will be managing this archive, including negatives, prints, documents and cameras. (Other material is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.Catalogue search, Museum of Modern Art (New York).)
Berengo Gardin named as influences on him the French photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat and Robert Doisneau; others have identified the Italian group La Gondola and the American photographer W. Eugene Smith.
Gianni Berengo Gardin is one of the great generation of poetic documentarists who like to compose with an idea in mind [...] [H]is sympathies have always been with those whose day-to-day activities support the fabric of society: workers, doctors, priests and even itinerant musicians.Ian Jeffrey, The Photography Book (London: Phaidon, 2000; ), p.47.
Berengo Gardin died on 6 August 2025, at the age of 94.Morto il fotografo Gianni Berengo Gardin, il maestro dei reportage: aveva 94 anni. Sua la battaglia contro le grandi navi a Venezia
Vaporetto, Venice, 1960
Berengo Gardin's "most renowned image of Venice", often referred to as Vaporetto, Venice, 1960:The title or caption varies, even in Italian. Italo Zannier, ed, Gianni Berengo Gardin: fotografie 1953–1990 (Udine: Art&, 1990; ): "Venezia, il vaporetto, 1960". Mario Peliti, et al, eds, © Copyright Gianni Berengo Gardin ([Rome]: Peliti Associati, 2001; ): "Venezia, 1960". (In each of these books, the plates are neither numbered nor on numbered pages.) As for English, here are three examples. Gianni Berengo Gardin, ed. Susanna Berengo Gardin, Italians = Italiener (Kempen: teNeues, 2000; ), plate 58: "Venice: in a vaporetto, 1960". Roberto Koch and Alessandro Mauro, eds, Gianni Berengo Gardin (Rome: Contrasto due, 2005; ), plate 11: "On a vaporetto, Venice, 1960". Denis Curti, ed., Gianni Berengo Gardin: Stories of a Photographer (Venice: Marsilio, 2013; ), first (unnumbered) plate: "Venice, aboard a vaporetto, 1960".
was taken in 1960, on a vaporetto with mirrored doors so that the passengers are trapped in a mosaic of reflections. Simultaneously mundane – the travellers are ordinary commuters – and exotic, it captures the paradox of a city trapped in an excess of representation.
Berengo Gardin described how it came about:
I was 30, living on the Lido in Venice, and every morning I took the vaporetto, or water bus, across to where I worked in San Marco. [...] It was a matter of pure luck, really. I was doing a lot of architectural photography, and this was a spontaneous shot: I only took one picture. In the centre there is a reflection in the glass door of the vaporetto, behind which stands a man all dressed in black. If he'd been wearing white, the shot wouldn't have worked.
The photograph was included in Berengo Gardin's book Venise des saisons (1965). It was warmly received; Henri Cartier-Bresson:
ranked [this photograph] among the 80 most important photographs ever taken. The co-presence of gazes and of frames within a frame makes it an exceptional in-camera montage of different spaces and human figures, reminiscent of Velasquez's illusions, and suggestive of this photographer's multiple artistic influences: the French school of reportage (Doisneau, Boubat, Ronis) and a group of Venetian photographers called La Gondola [...] and Eugene Smith's powerful renditions of black and white. At the end of the 1950s this new kind of reportage seemed to reconcile social documentary with the photographer's subjective exploration of the world, thus putting an end to the dispute about form and content that had divided many postwar image makers."In 2003, Henri Cartier-Bresson was curator of an exhibition, Les Choix d'Henri Cartier-Bresson, for his newly inaugurated Paris Foundation. This presented a variety of works that resonated for him, by a range of international artists. Gianni Berengo Gardin's Vaporetto was among the images included."
Books
Berengo Gardin was the sole contributor or a major contributor to a large number of photobooks: the exact number up to any time depends on various definitions – what a separate book is (as opposed to a mere new edition), what a "major" contribution is, and more – but one estimate in 2014 put the number at 250 (and added that "only 10 are in colour").
Morire di classe (1969) is probably the most celebrated among Berengo Gardin's books.Alone among books by Berengo Gardin, it is introduced in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's three-volume survey of photobooks; specifically, in The Photobook: A History, vol 2 (London: Phaidon, 2006; ), p.246 Other award-winning books (see "Awards") include India dei villaggi (1981, about the villages of India) and La disperata allegria and Zingari a Palermo (1994 and 1997, about the Romani people of Florence and Palermo respectively).
"Books such as Dentro le case and Dentro il lavoro are some of the best journalistic records of how people worked and lived in post-WWII Italy."Both books have photographs by Berengo Gardin (Rome and farther north) and Luciano D'Alessandro (Rome and farther south); Dentro le case was first published in 1977, Dentro il lavoro the following year. (The latter should not be confused with Berengo Gardin's Dentro il lavoro. Nello studio di Andrea Martinelli, of 2005.)
Exhibitions Berengo Gardin had many exhibitions: the number was described in 2008 as "around 200". A small sample is listed below.
Architectural Association, London, 1961 Le Guilde du Livre, Lausanne, 1965 Il nuovo impegno. Il Diaframma, Milan, November 1968. Exhibition by Berengo Gardin, and Toni Nicolini.Exhibition catalogue: Napoli '81. Sette fotografi per una nuova immagine. Naples, December 1981 – January 1982. Photographs of Naples by Berengo Gardin, Mario Cresci, Roberto Salbitani, Franco Fontana, Luigi Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice, and Antonia Mulas.Exhibition catalogue: Fotografie di Gianni Berengo Gardin per Il Mondo dal 1954 al 1965. Palazzo Dugani, Milan, January–February 1985.Exhibition catalogue: Trouver Trieste. Eiffel Tower, November 1985 – June 1986. Photographs of Trieste by various photographers.Exhibition catalogue: Bologna Museum of Modern Art, 1987 Rencontres internationales de la photographie d'Arles, July–August 1987.Exhibition catalogue: Refettorio delle , Milan, 1988 Photographs of women. Rome, 1989.Exhibition catalogue: Milan, 1990. Paris, 1990 Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne, 1991 Fotografi italiani, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, 1993 Gianni Berengo Gardin, un nomade fotografo. Giardino delle Oblate, Florence, October 1994. About Romani people in Florence.Exhibition catalogue: Ring. Galleria d'arte moderna, Bologna, 1994. Photographs by Berengo Gardin and Gabriele Basilico.Exhibition catalogue: Published by Ferrovie dello Stato and Peliti Associati. Artelaguna '95: opere d'arte per la laguna di Venezia. June–July 1995.Exhibition catalogue: The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968 (group exhibition). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 1994 – January 1995. Leica Gallery, New York, 1999. Gianni Berengo Gardin, Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau, Paris, 1997; Museo civico del Santo, Padua, 2001; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2001; Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia, 2002; Auditorium, Rome, 2004; La Triennale di Milano, 2004 Pagine di fotografia italiana 1900–1998, Fondazione Galleria Gottardo, Lugano, 1998 Memorie di un dilettante: Vintage prints 1952–1960. Galleria Minima Peliti Associati, June–July 1998.Exhibition catalogue: Exhibition related to Giò Pomodoro. International Cairo Biennale, in Cairo, December 1998 – February 1999.Exhibition catalogue: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2001 Retrospective. Museo Civico di Padova, Padua, June–October 2001.Exhibition catalogue: Les Choix d'Henri Cartier-Bresson (group exhibition). Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris, 2003. Toscana, gente e territorio. About the people and land of Tuscany. Fondazione Ragghianti (Lucca), July–October 2004.Exhibition catalogue: Miracolo a Pisogne. Pisogne, 2004. About the sculptor and the painter Girolamo Romanino.Exhibition catalogue: Piazza Lucretius, 2005. Cesare Zavattini. Tra letteratura, cinema, pittura. Pinacoteca Civica di Latina, October–December 2005. About Cesare Zavattini.Exhibition catalogue: Gianni Berengo Gardin. Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, February–May 2005.Exhibition notice, Maison européenne de la photographie. L'altro sguardo = Mit anderen Augen = A distinct regard. Bolzano, July–October 2005. About Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and European Union Youth Orchestra.Exhibition catalogue: Travelling exhibition about the Hera Group.Exhibition catalogue: