CWho wouldn’t want to own such a beautiful collection?
Even just a few pieces to look at from time to time would be enough. When we feel sentimental we look at theHomage to Fortuny by Sarah Moon or while we have dinner, enchanted by looking at a plant by Karl Blossfeldt to guess the species, imagine the flower or, lying on the sofa, dreaming in the clouds by Alfred Stieglitz. Beauty heals the soul.
Art illuminates life, allows us to grasp invisible messages, observation reveals secrets, the gaze questions, follows a mysterious path that reaches inside us, into that wild territory of emotion. We suspend judgement, we forget the formal rules, we abandon criticism, allowing ourselves to be enveloped and permeated to welcome it.
Who are the collectors?
Like many collectors, some of whom we have spoken about in this newspaper, Carla Sozzani has also chosen, selected, purchased, excluded, renounced. Collecting is an act of love. We fall in love with a work, we study it, we court it, we follow it, we negotiate it and we buy it.to. Often it’s really a question of falling in love. Reading collectors’ stories, it is evident. A collection can be born by chance, but then it is nourished because it relies on taste, knowledge and culture to exist. Qualities that Carla Sozzani unquestionably saw as the sum of all the things she has done: journalist, gallery owner, entrepreneur and in each of them she put her taste and style, so Corso Como 10 first and Sozzani Foundationnow, they have become beautiful adventures. He has dedicated his entire existence to the search for beauty, to the cult of style which is not just fashion, but rather a way of being in the world. If the passion for photography has always been there, it was precisely with the birth of Corso Como 10 in ’91 that he began to organize photographic exhibitions.
Photography, what a passion!
If for Sozzani, fashion was a great passion, photography was no less so, so much so that during his rich life he collected images that encompass the entire short history of the eighth art, as demonstrated by the works on display. Now, with the Sozzani Foundation, founded in 2016 and recently moved to the new headquarters in Via Bovisasca 8 in Milan, the project of preserving and enhancing photography, among the foundation’s other activities, has found its way.
Dominique Issermann, “Carla Sozzani from Azzedine Alaïa”, Paris 2014
The collection on display
Every story has its protagonists. In the history of collections there are curators. They are figures who, depending on their natural inclination, can be more or less visible, but they are fundamental, they can determine success or its opposite. Maddalena Scarzella, an architect by training, grew up in this context, from 2015 to 2022 she was responsible for the Sozzani Foundation for which she curated, in collaboration with Carla Sozzani, the programme, contents and installations of the exhibitions presented in Milan, Paris, Shanghai, Seoul and New York.
Today Maddalena lives in the woods between Liguria and Tuscany, she is renovating a village founded by her grandmother, an architect like her but, as she tells us, it is impossible to leave Carla Sozzani and therefore she is now signing this exhibition at the CaMdec in La Spezia.
Maddalena Scarzella is much more than the curator of Carla Sozzani’s photography, she is part of the family.
I have been collaborating with her since 2014. I was responsible for the gallery until 2022. I took care of everything: the production of the exhibitions, the selection of the artists, the entire exhibition program in Milan and in the various Corso Como venues. In 2022, with the transfer of the Foundation to Bovisasca, the exhibition program slowed down and since then we have started working on independent projects. I know this collection, I saw it born, a gigantic and wonderful archive of photographs of which Carla was completely unaware.
When did you understand the value of the collection?
I arrived at Sozzani in 2014, while I was settling in I saw all these photographs around me, they were everywhere, in public and private spaces, in his house, in his office, in our offices, in the corridors. Some are even ruined, exposed to time and the sun: his office in particular had all the walls occupied by images, there was not an empty space. At a certain point it seemed almost natural to think that it was a real collection.
How many works are we talking about?
Just under a thousand pieces that Carla scattered everywhere. Some are kept in drawers, but the interesting thing is that most of the photographs are on display until we were in Corso Como. They were everywhere, in the bookshop, in the shop, in the restaurant, beyond the home and offices I have already mentioned. When her friend, the designer Azzedine Alaïa, insisted in 2015 that she take stock of the collection he owned, I thought it was time to make a summary. We sat there and little by little, every day for almost a year, we cataloged everything and, in the meantime, new works always emerged.
Did you immediately have an exhibition?
We were already supposed to have the exhibition in Paris in 2016 curated by Fabrice Hergott, director of the Museum of Modern Art, perhaps this was the opportunity to put things in order. Perhaps thanks to that event Carla understood what she had. Until then she had enjoyed her photographs, enjoyed them and shared them with friends, but without taking the next step, without an exhibition project.
Is the collection growing?
This is also another interesting aspect: she has never dedicated herself to collecting, much less with an a priori idea, which is why it is difficult to describe the criteria by which she exists. There are works that I purchased personally: the first dates back to the 70s, it is the photograph of the New Guinea warriors by Irving Penn, then there is the self-portrait of Man Ray with a half beard that she has always kept in her office – in every one of her offices, from the 80s to today – who looks at her sternly. There are many purchased and many that he received as gifts from the artists he collaborated with, Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber, Peter Lindberg, etc. In 2019 we held the Masahisa Fukase exhibition and, on that occasion, the curator of the archive donated four works to the Foundation, as you can see still happens. In the past some works were acquired by the historian and critic Giuliana Scimè, targeted purchases, but I must say important ones such as the portfolio of Alfred Sstiglitz printed a year after his death.
Photography and fashion, how did they become engaged in the Sozzani Foundation?
She is a woman of fashion, but the transition to photography was physiological, first in magazines and then in galleries, in fact she has always used it to give shape to her ideas. Carla very often cites the photographer Alfa Castaldi as her teacher, but also as the one who always suggested her not to take fashion too seriously. If we look at his collection, except Steven Meisel, there are no fashion photographers, instead photography emerges as pure art.
Maddalena Scarzella now lives in the woods between Tuscany and Liguria, will she continue to collaborate with the Foundation?
Of course, no one ever leaves the family! I had a daughter and I moved here because my grandmother, in the 1960s, had built some houses in the woods. I imagined that a cultural project could be born, I wanted to recover this heritage. Now I started collaborating with the new director of CAMeC and this exhibition was born. Furthermore, with Carla we work on an educational project for students that the Foundation welcomes every year. In short, we make many good projects together and so in the end I’m always with her, I could never stay too far away from her.
THE EXHIBITION
Photosynthesis. Photographs from the Carla Sozzani collection
CAMeC – Center of Modern and Contemporary Art, La Spezia
Until March 22, 2026