Arturo Ghergo. Fotografie 1930-1959 Photography Exhibit May 25–Jul 8, 2012

In the panorama of "studio" photography in Italy from the 1930s to the 1950s, Arturo Ghergo is unquestionably the figure who best personifies the aspiration towards the ideal of beauty and elegance evoked by the Anglo-Saxon world by the term glamour.

Ghergo's iconographic formula ensured that he was to enjoy a practically unchanged reputation and immense public consideration right up to his premature death in 1959. Even as fashions changed and as new forms of expression were being introduced and tested with colour photography, advertising and painting, Ghergo remained essentially loyal to his style, continuing to evince his own personal and unfaltering allegiance to the cult of beauty -- a beauty which was not necessarily real, which may have been the result of a chemical and physical recording process in analog mode, but which was laboriously and meticulously constructed with the contrived, exalted and inspiring light that lay more in Ghergo's mind than in his sitter's features.