MILAN, ITALY.- The Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea presents Racconti dal paesaggio, 1984-2004 A vent'anni da Viaggio in Italia, curated by Roberta Valtorta. The Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea (Museum of Contemporary Photography) is the first public funded museum dedicated to photography in Italy. It's promoted by Provincia di Milano and Comune di Cinisello Balsamo with the contribution of Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita' Culturali and Regione Lombardia and it will reopen to the public next Saturday 27th November with "Racconti dal paesaggio. 1984-2004. A vent'anni da Viaggio in Italia", curator Roberta Valtorta. After twenty years the 1984 exhibition originally organized by Luigi Ghirri in collaboration with Gianni Leone and Enzo Velati will be re-displaied.

The Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea will exhibit approximately a hundred photographs, some of which from the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione of the University of Parma. The 1984 exhibition represented a vast collective project dedicated to the Italian landscape involving twenty photographers, seventeen of which were Italian, two American and one French: Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Giannantonio Battistella, Vincenzo Castella, Andrea Cavazzuti, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mario Cresci, Vittore Fossati, Carlo Garzia, Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Shelley Hill, Mimmo Jodice, Gianni Leone, Claude Nori, Umberto Sartorello, Mario Tinelli, Ernesto Tuliozi, Fulvio Ventura, Cuchi White.

Many of these have become worldwide known photographers, others university professors, publishers, gallery directors, cultural managers. They have all had an influence on future generations: their work has started a significant renewal in Italian photography placing it in relationship with arts, architecture, literature and cinema.

The 21st "traveler" was the writer Gianni Celati, who wrote for that occasion Verso la foce (reportage per un amico fotografo).

Viaggio in Italia had a straightforward theme: the Italian landscape. It also addressed a fascinating but complicated issue: the use of photography to illustrate the complexity of the world and the many human experiences entwined in the landscape. In the same way, Celati's work described the numerous stories that take place somewhere in a the landscape often becoming images.

At the beginning of the Eighties, while the project was taking form, what seemed like emerging the most was an unprecedented attention focused on the landscape. With time photography has been intended as a very flexible tool that can be used to relate with the world and to understand if and how much one belongs to it, how and how long one can inhabit it.

Viaggio in Italia shows how photography can be unaffermative, illustrating the complexity of places and their "possible" images. This type of photography is simple in its structure and enigmatic in its meaning, and sometimes can cause a sense of displacement and loneliness, almost of nostalgy.

Viaggio in Italia expresses the fundamental connection between landscape and travel and between physical and mental journey into the landscape. What was new in those years was that travelling was not intended to reach distant or exotic places, nor to elaborate sensational, original or creative forms of photography.

The Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea presents Viaggio in Italia twenty years later, through an exhibition; movies by Gianni Celati; courses with elementary and middle schools; a video (on DVD) directed by Maurizio Magri with the collaboration of Vittore Fossati, documenting the atmosphere of those years invervieing the main photographers; and an anthology of writings by Roberta Valtorta, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Gianni Celati, Marco Sironi, Ennery Taramelli, Giovanna Calvenzi, Paola Ghirri, Laura Gasparini, Giorgio Messori and by the photographers that contributed to the project. The book, published by Lupetti Editori, is accompanied by a DVD with the images from the original catalogue.