The Aesthetics of Industrial Excellence on Display at Bocconi

When it comes to Italian excellence, thought runs to images of fashion, food or cars. But there is a whole world behind that window that represents its substance: the factories and the people who made them. This is the story that Edward Rozzo, in his thirty years as an industrial photographer, has tried to tell. As professor at Bocconi in courses on innovative retail design and cinema and social theory, he has made the aesthetics of the industrial process his own stylistic specialty. The photographer-professor will be the protagonist of Hidden excellence - Italian industry between 1978 and 1996, a photographic exhibition that MIA Photo Fair will bring to Bocconi from 7 May to 13 September (basement floor, via Sarfatti 25).

"Italy loves to define itself as a producer of excellence. However, nobody looks at how these fine things are made, whether it's rubber, fashion, luxury cars or precision machinery, "says the photographer. Rozzo, unlike many committed colleagues like him in corporate photography, has never been interested in documenting, for example, the social conflict inherent in production: "I have always experienced the factory as a place of workers' pride and in my work I have always tried to represent the industrial process in its aesthetic side. I am fascinated by the beauty of the complexity inherent in it ".

This aesthetic impact, made of machinery or details of the production, is reflected in the many photographs that MIA Photo Fair brought to Bocconi: his works therefore break with the stereotyped documentary images that have often marked the representation of Italian industry, and create iconic images where reality turns into colors and shapes.