Art Kane, a master of 20th century photography.

The catalog of the first major Italian retrospective dedicated to him twenty years after his death and on the ninetieth anniversary of his birth. For the first time in Italy, classic and unpublished photographs that have helped to form the visual imagery of the second half of the twentieth century.

For al Art Kane (1925-1995) is the legendary photographer who at 10 o’clock on an August morning in 1958 immortalized 57 jazz legends for the magazine “Esquire” on a sidewalk on 126th street in Harlem. For many Art Kane was even more: an illusionist, the master of a photographic impressionism that still today solicits emotions and distills ideas.

Bronx New Yorker, after studying with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School, together with Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Diane Arbus, at the age of 27 Kane became the youngest art director in history. In 1958 he was consecrated as a photographer with a portrait of the legends of jazz in Harlem.

He then went through the sixties, seventies and eighties like a fury, revolutionizing photography with his wild esprit, discovering new techniques and customizing others to free it from its alleged “realism”. He has worked for fashion, publishing, made celebrity portraits, travel reports, and treated the naked with an implacable and innovative eye, under the banner of three fundamental elements: oversaturated colors, eroticism and surreal humor, on a par if not better than his contemporaries like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton.

Thirty years before Photoshop, armed only with a light table and a magnifying glass, Kane has become a real pioneer of photographic narration, which he has conducted also making use of metaphor and poetry, transforming, in fact, photography into illustration. All his photographs are pervaded by his irrepressible passion for life, for man and for a popular culture to be interpreted through symbols; visions that always communicate a very personal point of view, on racism and war, on mysticism or on sex, on fashion or on music. Nothing looks as we would expect it: the images suggest, provoke, displace, but it is up to the viewer to complete the picture.

Throughout his career, Kane has been honored by almost all photo-design organizations in the United States and his photographs are now in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.