Steve McCurry: journey around man

The exhibition of Steve McCurry in the Complesso Museale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena is extended to 6th January 2014. As for all the venues of Steve McCurry highly evocative exhibition that have been like a “ journey around Italy ”, even Siena has witnessed an extraordinary interest of both Italian and foreign public. To offer a wider opportunity to visit it, the exhibition has been extended until 6th January 2014. All visitors will receive a free audio guide where Steve McCurry himself tells his photos and through them his human and professional experience together with anecdotes, perspectives and exciting stories.

It will still be possible to book via internet or call center. The educational service of Santa Maria della Scala organizes new and engaging educational workshops for school groups. Steve McCurry is not only one of the greatest masters of photography of this century and a many time winner of the World Press Photo Awards, which can be considered as a sort of Nobel Prize of Photography, he is also a point of reference for a vast public, especially among young people who in his photographs recognise a way of observing our times and, in a certain sense, “recognise themselves”. The exhibition is curated by Peter Bottazzi who designed the show and by Biba Giacchetti of Sudest56 who represents McCurry and attends to all of his exhibiting activities. In the sign of a great scenographic impact, the set-up has been studied specifically for the premises of Santa Maria della Scala.

Each of the rooms that host the show are differentiated by theme and develops over the ancient “internal route” and adjoining rooms, today headquarters of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

In a sort of “journey around man”, the exhibition opens with Discovery: a great gallery of portraits that McCurry’s lens has captured in the span of his long experience, and continues to do so with every trip he takes. Among the veils serving as the backdrops of this gallery, each visitor will be able to explore his own itinerary through a series of cross-references that join the many men and women from the furthest reaches of the Earth. Examining the traces of an even more rarefied human presence, we venture into the Vertigo of war, pain and fear, which McCurry has documented with the same emotional participation.

In the following room, the visitor will instead find a world of Poetry where man redeems himself, approaches nature and the spirit, and recovers the joy of living. Surprise and Wonder characterise the fourth section where we find the most curious and unexpected images where man regains the gaze of childhood and enchantment with life. The final leg of the “journey around man” will be Memory with the projection, hosted in the Magazzini della Cordicella, of a National Geographic documentary that tells the story of the search for Sharbat Gula, the little Afghan girl, twenty years after the meeting that gave birth to one of the most famous photographic images in the world.

More than 200 photographs are in the exhibition, printed in various formats but mostly of large dimensions. Epson has realised a video in which, like a sort of backstage, it will recount the delicate task of colour printing on photographic paper. The exhibition of Steve McCurry comes to Siena after having been seen by some 400,000 visitors in four Italian cities, renewed in each set-up and in the selection of the images, and specially studied to strike up a dialogue with fascinating surroundings, like those of Santa Maria della Scala.

The Siena show will also include an anthology of McCurry’s entire production, with numerous of his most famous photos taken in the course of the more than 30 years of his extraordinary career as a photographer and journalist, along with a very wide selection of his most recent works: the project entitled The Last Roll of pictures shot using the last roll of film produced by Kodak, his latest trips to Cuba, Thailand and Myanmar, with a spectacular series of images dedicated to Buddhism, the trip to Tanzania and Ethiopia, and a selection of photographs shot in the course of his numerous recent sojourns in Italy.

Complesso museale Santa Maria della Scala
Piazza Duomo 1, Siena
Ph. +39 0577 534511
infoscala@comune.siena.it
www.santamariadellascala.com