Gian Butturini
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Butturini’s London depicts the poor and the working class who failed to make good in the 1960s, contrasting that with the tourist view" --Martin Parr “The blacks are sad. The blacks are good. The blacks are dignified. I was photographing them in Portobello Road, but they forced me to flee.” --Gian Butturini, 1969. |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Gian Butturini (1935-2006) was an Italian photographer best known for his photography book London (1969).
He began his career in the early 1950s as a graphic designer in Milan. The publication of London in 1969 marked his transition to photography. After catching the end of the Swinging Sixties in London, Butturini continued to take photographs, documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Fidel Castro’s Cuba and violence in Bosnia, among other key sights and events of the 20th century.
Blurb from the 2017 edition of London
In 1969 Gian Butturini was just over 30 years old and a successful graphic designer working in advertising. His journey as a photographer began at Victoria Station when he saw a young man staggering by with a syringe embedded in a vein. He began investigating 1960s London through the Nikon hanging from his neck.
Butturini’s photographs of London are full of pain and sarcasm but also joy and lyricism―hippies and fashionable young women share space with the homeless, the pacifist demonstrations and the orators at Speakers’ Corner. Butturini’s London, in the photographer’s own words, “is true and bare ... I did not ask it to pose.”
Gian Butturini: London is the new facsimile edition of Butturini’s cult 1969 photobook, which interspersed his black-and-white photographs with text by Allen Ginsberg. No less an authority than Martin Parr―who contributes a text to this new edition―has credited Butturini’s photobook with containing some of the best photographs ever taken of the British capital.
Incident
Parr was artistic director of the new Bristol Photo Festival, scheduled to launch in 2021. In July 2020 however, due to criticism of his involvement with a reissued edition of a photobook by Gian Butturini that contained what was considered to be a racist photograph, he quit as artistic director.
See also
- Fotoreporter
- Mietta Albertini
- Luciano D'Alessandro
- Vanna Paoli
- Lino Capolicchio
- Marmo Botticino
- Storia di Pinzano al Tagliamento
- Pinzano al Tagliamento
