{"id":526535,"date":"2018-04-26T19:07:43","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T19:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/?p=526535"},"modified":"2019-12-16T19:13:35","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T19:13:35","slug":"cyclopica-when-photography-tells-the-story-of-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/reportage\/cyclopica-when-photography-tells-the-story-of-work.html","title":{"rendered":"Cyclopica, when photography tells the story of work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Limmerboden<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What\n do workmen talk about on their lunch break, sitting on a steel beam at \nthe top of a skyscraper? It is both an intimate moment and a collective \nhistory, captured together by a photographer\u2019s click. On one hand we see\n the men\u2019s faces, full of fatigue and satisfaction; on the other, the \nepic story where they play a leading role: the construction of the \nRockefeller Center, one of the symbols of New York City and of America\u2019s\n rebirth after the Great Depression. In 1932, on September 19 to be \nexact, Charles Clyde Ebbets (the most likely author of a photograph that\n still hides a few mysteries) snapped the \u201cLunch atop a Skyscraper\u201d that\n immortalizes the workmen during their break and created an image that \nis hard for anyone to forget.
\nIt is this same magic that envelops the oil well fire fighter Paul \u201cRed\u201d\n Adair, soaked in crude oil as he struggles to put out a blaze in \nKuwait\u2019s wells with dynamite, photographed by maestro Sebasti\u00e3o Salgado.\n It is 1991, and this photograph becomes a poster for the first Gulf War\n just as it was coming to a close. There are other photographs by \nSalgado that depict work in a completely different way, not as a vehicle\n for development \u2013 as a form of desperation, where the poorest people on\n the planet struggle in a form of modern slavery, like the half-naked \nmen he photographed covered in mud in the gold mines of Sierra Pelada in\n Brazil, where they toil in inhuman conditions seeking their fortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to the contribution of masters like these, photography has become a tool to narrate the evolution of professional know-how and the achievements of the human race.<\/strong>\n Be they snapshots in black and white, posed portraits, or stolen images\n of men as they climb sheer cliff walls, their strength lies precisely \nin their ability to represent the immediacy of a moment, but also of the\n absolute importance of the labors of mankind.
\nThis representation of man also shows the importance of his \nwork, as well as the passage of time, the social and historical context,\n and economic development. <\/strong>There are many photographers who \nthrough their work became eyewitnesses to the Industrial Revolution. And\n there are many that captured the golden age of infrastructure, when \npioneers set out to build works that would become universal symbols.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Goglio<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Goglio Hydroelectric Plant \u2013 Italy 1936<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The first images of railways and railways stations spring to mind, \nphotographed in the 1800s by Edouard-Denis Baldus, or the images of \nLondon\u2019s Crystal Palace by Philip Henry Delamotte, or Delmaet and \nDurandelle\u2019s snaps capturing the most important moments of the \nconstruction of the Eiffel Tower. Or the work of Gabriele Basilico, one \nof the most well-known photographers of urban landscapes in the world. \nHis reportages from Milan, Shanghai, Istanbul, Silicon Valley, Rio de \nJaneiro and Beirut are slices of life that bear witness to the story of \ntoday\u2019s urban agglomerations.
\nAll of these experiences offer yet more proof of how man\u2019s challenge to \nrealize epic infrastructure works has always captured the imagination of\n the world\u2019s great photographers, because stealing those images means \nimmortalizing an historic moment and telling the story of a world that \nis destined to change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyclopica, a photographic voyage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From the shots by British photographer John Myers of crumbling \nabandoned factories in the U.K. to Sweden\u2019s M\u00e5rten Lange and his \nportraits that tell the tale of the solitude of today\u2019s white collar \nemployees, photography is capable of capturing the soul of a moment forever and then letting us relive it each time we stop to look.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the idea behind \u201cCyclopica,\u201d the photography \nexhibition organized by Salini Impregilo from May 1 to June 3 at Milan\u2019s\n Triennale. The show will recount moments lived by people in distant \nlands and their epic adventures, and the unique experience of working \nwith hundreds of other people to build a large infrastructure project. <\/strong>The\n men who opened a gap in the American continent to build the Panama \nCanal, or the ones who brought electricity to Italy, contributing to the\n country\u2019s industrialization, thanks to the dams built by Edison in the \nremotest towns in the Alps (immortalized by director Ermanno Olmi), or \ndug tunnels burrowing hundreds of metres into the Earth show us how \nthey  work. And with their work they create a Cyclops, or those \ninfrastructure giants that have helped entire populations grow.
\nIt is through the relationship of man and the Cyclops \u2013 or between dwarf\n and giant, but also between wits and strength \u2013 that over 2,000 \ninfrastructure projects come to life through Salini Impreglio\u2019s history \nof over a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This relationship has been captured in over 1.2 million \nimages and 600 videos, conserved in the Salini Impregilo archives, from \nphotographers that the group relied on to convey its desire to talk \nabout its evolution from its origins 110 years ago to the present.<\/strong>\n It was Antonio Paoletti and Guglielmo Chiolini who at the start of the \n1900s were the first to preserve a record of life on a building site, \nhighlighting ambivalence about the difference between the enormity of \nthe structures and the human dimension \u2013 while still keeping man in the \nforeground. Armin Linke, Moreno Maggi, Edoardo Montaina and Filippo \nVinardi took the same approach through the years right up to the most \nrecent works.
\nToday these images are being shared with the public in a selection that \ntakes the visitor on a voyage in time and space, through different \nhistoric epochs and to faraway countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do workmen talk about on their lunch break, sitting on a steel beam at the top of a skyscraper? It is both an intimate moment and a collective history, captured together by a photographer\u2019s click. On one hand we see the men\u2019s faces, full of fatigue and satisfaction; on the other, the epic story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":172386,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-526535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reportage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526535"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":526565,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526535\/revisions\/526565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526535"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=526535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}