Galleria Campari presents Bar Stories on Camera. Galleria Campari / Magnum Photos from Wednesday 4 October 2023 until Tuesday 30 April 2024 at the Galleria Campari spaces in Sesto San Giovanni, Milan.
The exhibition presents 90 photographs from the 1930s to the early 2000s that tell the world of the bar through 48 images from the Galleria Campari Historical Archive and 42 shots by 24 international photographers from the Magnum Photos agency, including Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt, Martin Parr and Ferdinando Scianna.
Bar Stories on Camera is the first exhibition realised by Galleria Campari in partnership with Magnum Photos.
Divided into three thematic sections – Sharing Moments, Bar Campari, The Icons – the exhibition presents images that build a narrative composed of stories, rituals and characters from Italy and the world.
The images create a narrative that explores the theme at 360°, told through the lens of time. Through the dialogue between different media, supports, eras and imagery, all the multifaceted vitality of the bar world in a unique historical period is rendered, in an exploration of its social connotation as a place of meeting, aggregation, leisure and cultural exchange in which Campari has been a protagonist since 1860.
The exhibition presents a fourth section, Campari Memories, which contains a large selection from the Campari Archive of recipe books and books on cocktails from the late 19th century to the 2000s, as well as original objects and ephemera related to the bar, some of which have never been exhibited before: menus, letterheads, visibility signs, glasses, mixing tools, posters and vintage advertising objects.
Finally, there is a collection of numerous Campari neon sign studies, which enliven the well-known red of the Bitter with an unexpected array of additional colours.
Galleria Campari is an evocative space but also a centre of research and cultural production that focuses its activities on what has made Milan and Italy great: art, design, the ability to do business through innovation that rests on the solid foundations offered by tradition.
For more information visit www.campari.com/it-it/galleria-campari.
