Gianni Berengo Gardin, born in 1930, left us yesterday and was one of the masters of photojournalism as we know it in Italy. A true craftsman of documentary photography, he was able to narrate the world with elegance, sensitivity, and narrative rigor. A passionate autodidact, he began his photographic career in the second half of the 1950s with publications in Il Mondo, and collaborated with Italian and international outlets such as Domus, Epoca, Stern, Time, Vogue Italia, and Le Figaro.

His style stands out for its ability to transform everyday scenes into deep, poetic visual stories. His black-and-white photography, attentive to composition and context, investigated postwar Italian society with a critical, engaged eye. Among his most iconic works are Morire di classe, which documented the conditions of psychiatric hospitals before the Basaglia reform, and Vaporetto, Venice, 1960, a chance shot that became emblematic of his poetics: a reflection that traps passengers within the frame, capturing life in motion in a unique way.

Berengo Gardin published over 250 photography books and exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums including MoMA in New York and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His images are held in major archives, and a significant part of his visual treasure—negatives, prints, documents—has been entrusted to the Fondazione FORMA per la Fotografia in Milan.

Above all else, Gianni Berengo Gardin embodied a craft-based vision of making photographs. Film, the darkroom, grain: these were essential elements of his language, because photography, for him, meant telling with truth and authenticity, without compromise.

With a career that spanned times, places, and sensibilities, Berengo Gardin leaves an extraordinary legacy in the landscape of contemporary photography: that of a patient, mindful eye, able to endow everyday life with the aura of the immense.

© Gianni Berengo Gardin/Courtesy Fondazione Forma