Giovanni Chiaramonte Biography
Giovanni Chiaramonte (Varese, 1948) is an Italian photographer and photojournalist. In 1974 he exhibited the works “Sequenza nel tempo” and “Dov'è la nostra terra” at the Galleria Il Diaframma of Lanfranco Colombo; also from that year is “Christmas Speech”, a series of sequential shots of Paul VI's speech broadcast on public television. In the following two years he deepened his theological studies, approached American photography and the work of Ugo Mulas; in 1977 he founded the Punto e Virgola publishing house with Luigi Ghirri (with whom he would later share many descriptive undertakings of the Italian landscape) and others. In the early 1980s he began producing essays and working as a curator, with the exhibitions “Italy. A country shaped by man” and “Contemporary Spanish photographers”. In 1984 he was among the photographers involved by Luigi Ghirri in the "Viaggio in Italia" enterprise, and two years later in "Exploreations on the Via Emilia"; between 1984 and 1988 he completed the work “Terra del return”. The volume "Through the plain" is from 2005, which collects images created starting from 1987 and dedicated to the theme of the Po Valley territory crossed by motorways. Already from the first research on the Italian landscape, Chiaramonte's work manifests itself as a personal sequence of images in which the photographs, although individually significant, collectively acquire an extraordinary narrative force. Characteristic of his photography is the use of the square format, derived from the 6x6 negative. He attributes a symbolic value to the square, a value of relationship between earth and sky, in which all the elements find their right place. After the exhibition and the volume Contemporary European Photography, in which he presented the most important authors of his generation in 1983, he first dedicated himself to the relationship between place and man's identity with the volumes Gardens and Landscapes, 1983, and Peninsula of Figures, 1993 He then addresses the essential drama of the roots and destiny of the West in Land of Return, 1989, and in Westwards, 1996. An elegy and a return journey to the places of the Mediterranean is At the Edge of the Sea, 1999.
