GABRIELE BASILICO’S SEEN CITIES

He was the photographer of cities, urban spaces, places crowded with buildings but devoid of people. Gabriele Basilico conveyed the transformation of the urban space through photos depicting empty cities in the midst of transforming. With great attention and care, at times obsessively so, his point of view is recognizable in all of his works. Basilico photographed cities that we seem to recognize, but which, actually, could be anywhere or perhaps nowhere at all. These cities resemble one other, - in their seeming to be an urban agglomeration without atmosphere - yet, they do hold on to their differences and strong identity. Among Basilico’s photos are the ruins of Beirut and Istanbul, the streets of Buenos Aires and Naples far from the city centers, the concrete-rich areas of Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro and the penetrating silence of the outskirts of French cities.

And then there’s Milan, his Milan, where he was born in August 1944, when the war wasn’t over yet and the city that he would turn into his central character wasn’t yet populated by buildings, but by the rubble of all those bombings. Starting from the late seventies, Milan will always remain at the center of his camera lens. Gabriele Basilico entered its neighborhoods very discreetly, gathering their essence, capturing the progressive evolution of the city center and the transformation of the suburbs, which will fascinate him for their complexity.

Basilico would not look at the cities to judge them, but rather to discover them, very often photographing them from above in order to gain a greater distance from them and look at them slowly in order to grasp their abundance. Gabriele Basilico’s photos become a visual narration of the metropolis concept: cities that tell their stories, their relationships with the past but also with other cities. Basilico’s work is only seemingly clinical and detached, It is actually a memory exercise and a reconstruction of metropolises devoid of men yet full of their selves.