At the start of Milan Fashion Week, Armani unveiled a new exhibition. ‘Magnum Photos – Colors, Places, Faces’ has been on display since June 19 at the Armani Silos in Milan, the Italian fashion house’s cultural center for fashion and art. The exhibition is “a multi-layered narrative that reflects a unique blend of art, journalism and storytelling through a kaleidoscope of diverse visions,” Armani said on Wednesday.
The exhibition was curated by founder and designer Giorgio Armani himself and brought to life in collaboration with Magnum Photos, an international agency for photographers. “Photography has always fascinated me because the emotion it evokes is similar to the sense of surprise you feel when you see reality from an unexpected angle,” says Armani. He emphasizes that he is particularly fascinated by the attention to reality that the Magnum photographers showed.
‘Magnum Photos – Colors, Faces, Places’ gives visitors a glimpse of different worlds and cultures through the lenses of ten different Magnum photographers. The works on display range from portraits taken by Christopher Nadersons in China, to a series of photos by Olivia Arthur that looks at Dubai’s transformation from a village to a metropolis through the eyes of a returnee, to shots in Morocco by Bruno Barney that depict the escape of the city versus modernity. The exhibition takes the viewer back to the dynamics of the 1950s using color photographs by Werner Bischof, while Newsha Tavakolian’s photographs capture the colorful diversity of Latin America.
In this sense, the exhibition is also a journey through time through the history of Magnum Photos – because the agency was one of the first whose photographers “swimmed against the tide”, experimenting with color photographs and mainly places, people and cultures before the era of mass tourism photographed. Today, Magnum Photos continues to describe its photographers as “observant witnesses to history” who offer “different and new perspectives on reality”.
The exhibition will be accessible at the Armani Silos in Milan until November 6, 2022. In addition to the temporary exhibitions shown in the Armani Silos, there is a permanent exhibition that tells the story of the Italian fashion house and provides an insight into Giorgio Armani’s sources of inspiration.