The photographic exhibition “Mario Cresci. The Gold of Time” (curated by Francesca Fabiani, with exhibition design and graphics by Etaoin Shrdlu Studio), the result of a collaboration between the ICCD – Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation in Rome and the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, is open to the public at 1023 Hilgard Avenue until 11 October 2025.
The project was funded through a call promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, aimed at enhancing contemporary Italian photography worldwide through the network of Embassies, Consulates and Italian Cultural Institutes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
“With this exhibition, we are bringing to Los Angeles not only the work of a great master of Italian photography, but also a meditation on time, memory and the transformative power of the artistic gaze. Mario Cresci plays with images from the past to reveal new meanings, showing how the archive is not merely a place of preservation but also a ground for invention. Italian tradition becomes a contemporary code. A powerful message in a city that has made image both its language and its identity”, said Emanuele Amendola, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute.
The exhibition presents the work created by Mario Cresci as part of the ICCD/Artists in Residence programme, which invites leading photographers to engage with the Institute’s historical collections. Reawakening the layered meanings of the photographs preserved at the ICCD through the perspective of a contemporary artist is one of the most fruitful ways of bringing to life these immense image archives—more than eight million photographic items—by repositioning them in the present day.
The works on display include a series of black-and-white prints that interpret and re-elaborate, in a playful and experimental key, two historic photographic collections of the ICCD united by the centrality of the human figure, the guiding thread of this project: the portraits of high society at the fin de siècle by Mario Nunes Vais and the documentary photographs of Greco-Roman statuary.
