Mar. 25 - Pietro Donzelli is a photographer, better yet, a pioneer of photographic culture in postwar Italy. Born in Monte Carlo in 1915, he passed on May 29, 1998 at the age of 83. Donzelli lived with his family in Milan, but exhibited his works in the most prestigious museums in England, France, the US and Japan. And now Germany is ready to pay homage to the Italian artist with the exhibition "Luce - Photographs by Pietro Donzelli". The exhibition - which opens today and will remain open until Sunday, June 14 (Kunst- und Kulturstiftung Opelvillen Rüsselsheim, Ludwig-Dörfler-Allee 9, Rüsselsheim) - was organized on occasion of the centenary of the birth of the artist. The most important photos were created in the 1950s and 1960s, when Italian neorealism favored new forms of expression in art, film and photography. Donzelli had always been attentive to those moments in which feeling manifested itself in people's lives. In his art, Donzelli always found a good ally in light. Thanks to his work, Donzelli was able to actively promote photography as an artistic discipline, and in 1954, he worked with Luigi Veronesi on the yearbook "Italian Photographers" and, with Piero Racanicchi on "Criticism and history of photography." (Red)

THE ARTIST

Pietro Donzelli was born in Monte Carlo in 1915. In 1931, he was hired as an archivist for Sirti, the Milan-based company in charge of building the national telephone network. Enlisted in the Army in 1943, after the war he joined the Milan Photography Club (CFM). In 1951, with the Photo Union, he organized in Milan, at Palazzo di Brera, the Exhibition of European Photography. From 1957 to 1963, Donzelli was editor and co-editor of the Italian edition of Popular Photography. He published, with Piero Racanicchi, "Criticism and History of Photography", in two volumes. In 1960, with the Union, he curates the Photographic exhibition "Photographers of the new generation." In 1988, forty years after its foundation, the Italian Federation of Photographic Associations (FIAF) awarded him the title of "Italian Master of Photography" and 3M awarded him the prize "A Life for photography." In 1994, Donzelli started working with Renate Siebenhaar. In 1997, Jean-Christophe Ammann realized the first retrospective on Donzelli, presented at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. The artist died in Milan in 1998, just weeks before the opening of his retrospective in Arles, during the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie.