ROME - The black boy who laughs while pointing a gun at his temple. It is no coincidence that Elliott Erwitt, one of the greatest living photographers, considers his youthful black and white shot particularly dear. The little protagonist plays by evoking a tragic moment, "Everything is serious but it may not be," so the master summarizes his way of looking at the world. The "Icons" exhibition that offers the best of the best of his long career in Rome until May 17, is the palpable proof of how seriousness and irony, the double value of a life that can be dramatic and cheerful, have constantly guided him in tell the great characters of the twentieth century, events, stars, fashions, dogs, nature, landscape, the city.
It was Erwitt, who is 92 years old and lives in New York, to select one by one with Biba Giacchetti, the curator who has been friends with him for more than twenty years, the 70 suggestive images exhibited at WeGil, the beautiful building in Trastevere district that was the seat of the Italian Youth of the Littorio and of which the Lazio Region is completing the restoration. "The criterion that has shaped the choice - explains Giacchetti - is that of the photographs he loves most, which he believes represent him most".
Obviously, among the truly iconic images of John Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Cassius Clay who is about to fall to the carpet, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, there is the famous "Califofornia kiss" of 1956, the kiss of the two lovers in the rearview mirror of a car stopped in front of the sea at sunset. "It is the first that I asked him as a gift - says the curator, who knew Erwitt over the years of their joint work in the legendary Magnum agency of Robert Capa - and he looked at me in disgust considering it too sugary. He had to resign himself to the success of this photo, which expresses an extraordinary composition ".
The exhibition - promoted by the Region in collaboration with Sud Est 57 - was created to leave a trace of Erwitt's passage in Italy. "When Elliott is no longer with us - says Biba Giacchetti - all his archive will go to an American university that has already absorbed part of the material. Me and my partner Giuseppe Cerone, his two godchildren, wanted to build the exhibition of his most loved photographs to be able to keep it in our country and make it run. We have bought all the individual prints, it is a heritage that will remain in Italy ".
Photos full of irony, of a surreal, sometimes romantic vein alternate with those of great dramatic power such as the eyes of Jacqueline Kennedy shocked by pain during her husband's funeral, with the face of her brother-in-law Robert on the edge of the image. Of course, the sequence of Marilyn and the smiling close-up of "Che" stand out, Nixon pointing his index finger on the collar of the jacket of an apparently intimidated Khrushchev, Jack Keuouac and Marlene Dietrich, the stellar cast of the film "The Moved". But the 'anthropomorphic' poodle leaning on a balustrade next to four people, the series of famous dogs portrayed from below according to their point of view, a few centimeters from the feet of their masters, and the oddities fixed by grasping a smile the moment or result of careful preparation. "If my images help someone to see things in a certain way - Erwitt explained - it is probably to look at things more lightly".