At this time of year, Bologna is the heart of the Photo Valley, with a significant number of exhibitions. We mention some of them, starting with Nino Migliori: i miei gioielli , dedicated to a still little-known work by this multifaceted artist of the image.
The Museo Civico Archeologico houses a nucleus of display-cases, placed on tables designed by Mario Cucinella, containing the collection of jewellery created by Migliori in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as five light boxes with as many photographs, in which Migliori reinterprets his own creations (in a very creative way, as is typical of him) through photography, the artistic instrument he is most congenial with. The exhibition is part of do ut do, the biennial of art, architecture and design (this year’s theme is Desire), and espouses its aim, which is to support the care and training activities of the MT Chiantore Seràgnoli Hospice Foundation.
Until 10 February, 2025.

Same venue for Martin Parr. Short & Sweet: the career of one of the best-known contemporary documentary photographers is traced through more than 60 photographs and the installation Common Sense consisting of 250 images and a previously unpublished interview. The exhibition opens ‘in black and white’ with the series The Non-Conformists, taken between 1975 and 1980, and Bad Weather. The idea was to create a work inspired by a British obsession: the weather. Thus, with an underwater camera, Parr plunged into rain, drizzle and snowstorms. The exhibition continues with colour, the colour that characterises Parr’s work, saturated, unexpected and daring: from The Last Resort to Common Sense, from the Small World series to Establishment, up to ‘beach photography’ with Life’s a Beach.
Until 6 January, 2025.

The large photographs by Vera Lutter welcome and surround those who enter the Fondazione MAST to visit SPECTACULAR. An Exploration of Light. They are large, in the truest sense of the word, produced in a single copy in darkrooms the size of a room or a container with a hole drilled for light to enter (this is her photographic equipment), on an imposing square metre of sensitive paper. They are images that require reflection on the part of the viewer in order to bring them back into the normal perception of vision: they are, in fact, in the negative and with their sides inverted. They require time to contemplate and revolutionise the too-fast approach demanded of us today by the excessive flow, the overproduction of images on the Internet, in a world we live in, that is increasingly saturated with images, to the point where id difficult to retain them. At the exhibition, you can also experience the thrill of entering a real darkroom.
Until 6 January, 2025.

While the Palazzo Pallavicini is hosting the exhibition dedicated to Tina Modotti (until 16 February, 2025), the Palazzo d’Accursio features Contemporary Museum Watching, a monographic exhibition by Alex Trusty, with images from a selection of 25,000 photographs taken over a decade in more than eighty museums worldwide, portraying viewers (and their reactions) in front of works of art.
Until 16 February, 2025.

The Cinema Modernissimo is hosting the Tutti De Sica. Regista & Interprete exhibition, with photographs taken on and off the set, objects and personal documents to re-read the life and art of one of the masters of 20th-century cinema.
Until 12 January, 2025.

Immagini del No. Il reenactment. Le fotografie di Anna Candiani e Paola Mattioli , at the MAMbo- Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, is a re-proposition, on its 50th anniversary, of the photographic project Immagini del No, produced during the 1974 referendum campaign to abolish the divorce law in Italy, and presented that year in an exhibition organised by Lanfranco Colombo at the historic Galleria Il Diaframma in Milan.
Until 12 January, 2025.

With the double solo exhibition of Camilla Di Bella Vecchi and Marco Gualdoni, Flemish Flair, whose style recalls the atmospheres of Flemish artists, the Leòn Gallery dedicated to contemporary art with a focus on photography, opens.
Until 15 February, 2025.

The project Moraduccio (fotografo + soggetto)  by Alessandro Trapezio and Italo Zuffi, began as research, also biographical, developed during a journey between Bologna and Florence along the Santerno river. On display at Alchemilla, Palazzo Vizzani.
Until 21 December, 2024.

The Sale della Musica, degli Incanti e dei Sogni at the Palazzo Ducale, Sassuolo, part of the Gallerie Estensi museum system (Modena) are the ideal setting for the exhibition Gianni Berengo Gardin. Marazzi, le linee veloci. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the patenting of the revolutionary rapid single-firing process (which changed the tile production process in the 1970s), a quite interesting photographic corpus is presented. Created by Berengo Gardin for the Marazzi manufacturing company, it departs from traditional documentary photography and is almost unique in the photographer’s production, capturing and rendering the flow of colours and shapes in the form of a shot (‘high-speed lines’ become abstraction), crystallising moments of the production process.
Until 31 December, 2024.

The exhibition dedicated to the thirteenth edition of the Premio Davide Vignali, which promotes the creativity of young talents from the territory (in thirteen years the prize has involved over 1000 young people), is at Palazzo Santa Margherita, Modena.
Until 12 January, 2025.

Palazzo dei Musei, is the ideal destination to see photography until spring, as well as during the forthcoming festivities. In fact, alongside the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. Zone di passaggio (until 2 March, 2025), which proposes a reflection on darkness to recount its value in the collective imagination, one can observe the evolution, also sociological, of photographic research on the transformations of the territory.

This is On Borders | Sui Confini L’esperienza d’indagine di Linea di Confine per la Fotografia Contemporanea, which includes over 260 photographic works from the Linea di Confine collection, deposited in the Fototeca of the Biblioteca Panizzi in Reggio Emilia. It is the result of more than thirty surveys carried out on the regional and national territory between 1990 and 2022. By promoting photographic research on the transformations of the territory, flanked by the original educational experience of the “Laboratori di fotografia”, Linea di Confine has represented, on the Italian and European panorama, one of the most significant experiences of territorial investigation in the field of public commissions.
Until 23 March, 2025.

APE Parma Museo, the cultural and exhibition centre of the Fondazione Monteparma, presents the retrospective curated by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and dedicated to Giovanni Chiaramonte. Fotografia come Misura del Mondo gives voice to Chiaramonte’s complex artistic experience and his devotion to the knowledge of the world, placing elements in a measured space. His research, steeped in spirituality, aims to penetrate the essence of things. The exhibition is accompanied by the monograph Giovanni Chiaramonte, part of the new Electaphoto series.
Until 9 February, 2025.

The Circolo Fotografico Renato Brozzi-APS presents Enza. Punti di vista: 11 autori, 11 visioni, 11 storie. More than 40 images tell of the curious aspects, life and nature of a river that geographically separates the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia, but actually connects the territories. At the Centro Civico La Corte di Traversetolo (PR).
Until 29 December, 2025.

At the Spazio Antonioni, Ferrara, there is the exhibition Bruce Davidson / Zabriskie Point. I volti dell’America, dealing with the meeting between Davidson and director Michelangelo Antonioni during the filming of the movie, investigates the youthful universe of countercultures. Davidson, here a set photographer, portrayed Death Valley, Los Angeles, and a society in which the myth of wealth, violence and repression coexist.
Until 4 May, 2025.

Also in Ferrara, the MLB Gallery proposes Quella casa, a curatorial project aimed at rediscovering and reinterpreting of the work of the historic artist Milli Gandini, one of the founders of the “Gruppo Femminista Immagine” of Varese in 1974, compared with the work of Anna Di Prospero, who obsessively photographs subjects linked to places and people: the home, the outdoors, family members, strangers, microcosms and the cosmos.
Until 2 February, 2025.

Jacques Henri Lartigue e André Kertész Maestri della fotografia moderna is the new exhibition held at Villa Mussolini, Riccione. More than one hundred iconic images provide an opportunity to immerse oneself in the world of these two photographers who, despite their different personal paths, captured the intensity of everyday life at the beginning of the 20th century. They range from Kertész’s introspection and observation of urban life to Lartigue’s depiction of dynamism and spontaneity.
Until 6 April 2025.