Lhe last exhibition, last autumn, dedicated it to Raffaella Carrà. But there had been before Liz Taylor, Monica Vitti, Shirley MacLane, Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Gina Lollobrigida.
Chiara Samugheo, born Paparella, known as the photographer of divas, of the Dolce Vita, of an era of revolution and freedom, she disappeared yesterday, January 13 in Bari, where she was born on March 25, 1925 (even if her date of birth has always been 1935).
Chiara Samugheo, brilliant and rebellious artist
She was a brilliant artist, a pioneer of photojournalism, able to renew the studio portrait in a striking way. A woman who did of emancipation and its passions a banner of life, so much so that she left Bari, her hometown, very young, to pursue her dreams.
And his way of using the camera will become a model for subsequent fashion and film photography of the 80s. They are more than 165 thousand shots preserved in Study Center and Communication Archive of the University of Parma. An inestmable heritage.
Traveling around the world with a camera
She had returned to Bari at the end of a very intense professional life spent between Milan, Rome and Nice, which began after fleeing “Rebelling” against the wishes of the parents who coveted for her un future as a school teacher and wife. Friend of journalists and intellectuals, from Enzo Biagi to Pierpaolo Pasolini, to Giorgio Strehler, she became romantically linked to the journalist Pasquale Prunas, the one who recommended the name of the Sardinian village as a stage name.
The arrival to photography for the cinema after an initial period dedicated to news and social reportage. Hence the success that led her to sign the covers of major international magazines and to establish herself as the first Italian professional photographer.
Chiara Samugheo between Dolce Vita and contradictions
With the death of Chiara Samugheo is also lost a woman capable of telling the second half of the 20th century through images. To embody the years of the Dolce Vita, portraying the divas and protagonists of the jet set, but also showing the profound contradictions of a country not yet fully aware of itself.
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