Padua Postcards
Photo Exhibition by Francesca Magnani
November, 14 2023 – January, 31 2024
Padua Postcards, an exhibition of 28 images by photojournalist Francesca Magnani, on display at the Italian Cultural Institute. The exhibition can also be viewed online.
“When I see a photograph by Francesca Magnani, I look for people,” writes the critic Julie Lasky in the presentation of the exhibition. “Most of the time people fill the frame: intense and aware figures, full of the vivid colors of street encounters, turn to the camera’s eye with a big smile or are perhaps captured while witnessing an event: a wedding procession, a Black Lives Matter demonstration, the lighting of the lights that outline the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge like a pearl necklace, as the sun sets over New York Bay.”
“Her new exhibition represents a homecoming in more ways than one. Five years have passed since Magnani, who has lived in New York since 1997, returned to her native Padua. It shows us sellers of fruit and vegetables that shine like jewels, expert exponents of the agitated national political life, distracted lovers and tourists crossing the historic square, immigrants in transit in the station, poised between worlds. It’s thousands of miles from New York and yet the subjects are the same.”
This photo exhibition is part of Under the Stars of Giotto Exhibition
Paduan Francesca Magnani has been photographing, writing and translating from New York since 1997 when she arrived at City University thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, after graduating in Modern Literature in Bologna with a thesis in Latin Literature on Martial and the epigram. Since then, she has told the stories that strike her with images and words, at the same time documenting her own life.
Some of her 2020 photographs were acquired by the Smithsonian Museum in Washington into the permanent historical archive and are part of the first set of digital documents on the pandemic. Two COVID-19-themed photos were exhibited in New York Responds: The First Six Months at the Museum of the City of New York, and one of these photos was part of #ICPconcerned, the large group exhibition at the International Center of Photography. And to return to Padua, her New York portraits were exhibited in Via Roma at the Samonà Gallery in 2017 (Qui. Street stories tra Padova e New York) and in the spring of 2023 (Maschi e maschere. Ritratti newyorkesi)).
Follow her on @magnanina and francescamagnani.com.