Lanfranco Colombo’s Diaframma, an Italian story

The exhibition, supported by the Office of Cultural Politics of the City of Rome and the 3M Foundation and organised by the Fotoleggendo Cultural Association, illustrates various aspects of the history of photography from the Sixties to today, spread across, reporting and research, portraits and naturalistic photography, fashion and still life.
Next to the Italian artists – it can be said that nearly all of the great national photographers passed through Diaframma – are displayed for comparison, many exceptional examples of French, American, English, Japanese, Spanish, and German photography, as well as an interesting panorama of Russian photography.

The history of Diaframma began on the 13th April 1967 in the Via Brera no.10 in Milan, with the opening of Paolo Monti’s photography exhibition, which also collected, next to the classic black and white images by the artist, who had become a professional in 1954, some abstract experiments in colour. On that day was born a gallery, which, opened by Lanfranco Colombo, a Milanese director of industry driven by a passion for photography, would have an important role in the story of Italian photography.
Colombo had already been marked both as a photographer – winning the Miami Prize in 1963 for his book “Five Runes” and the following year the Nadar Prize for “From the Orient” – and as an editor: in 1966 he had brought into existence the Il Diaframma publishing house and an Italian edition of the Amerian magazine “Popular Photography”. But it was the opening of the gallery, the first in Europe completely dedicated to photographic art, which confered on him the role of reference point for which he was to be universally known.
For many years, indeed, though the two floors of the gallery passed both Italian and foreign authors of extraordinary importance, some already well-known, such as Mario De Biasi, Gianni Berengo Gardin, and Mario Giacomelli, and others who were to become so after their debut on these very walls, such as Gabriele Basilico or Giuseppe Pino.

If it is impossible to synthesis in a few lines the lengthy story of Il Diaframma, through almost thirty years, it is easy to understand the importance of a gallery which has ferried Italian photography from the pioneering era, when only a few experts were interested in it, to the present, where the role and importance it has are finally recognised. If today in Italy there are galleries, festivals, schools, exhibitions of international value, this too is due to the road which, almost forty years ago, Il Diaframma started to point out, making the gallery become a point of encounter from which innumerable ideas were born.