Time.news – There is the hippie with round glasses and long hair who looks like Jesus, next to the employee with the bowler hat, the junkie and the homeless along with the ladies of the upper class with the Royal palace-style flowered hats.
The thousand facets, lights and shadows, of London in the late sixties are told in the photos of the photojournalist Gian Butturini (1935-2006), with the exhibition “London 1969-Derry 1972. A photographer against. From Swinging London to Bloody Sunday”, which from January 26 can be visited at Still Fotografia (until March 6), in Milan.
© Gian Butturini
Derry 1972
The exhibition proposes a collection of 50 photographs which document on the one hand the contradictions of London in that period, on the other land political and social tensions in Northern Ireland following Bloody Sunday, the massacre that took place in Derry on January 30, 1972.
And precisely this date is significant for today’s exhibition: the January 30, 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of that bloody Sunday, when the English army fired on the crowd of demonstrators, killing fourteen.
© Gian Butturini
Belfast, 1972
Butturini, who began taking pictures of the Northern Irish conflict a week after the events in Derry, testifies to the radicalization of the political and military situation in that country. In such dark and threatening atmospheres, between barricades, Friesland horses, barbed wire, soldiers armed with machine guns, burnt cars on the side of the roads, the photojournalist portrays children, innocent victims of a dramatic conflict. From this work the photo book was born “From Ireland after Londonderry. With the testimonies of Catholics on the English repression“title that already makes it clear that the author wanted to accompany the images with texts and documents.
© Gian Butturini
London, 1969, Visiting Portobello
The Milanese exhibition, in via Zamenhof, curated by Gigliola Foschi and Stefano Piantini, promoted by the Gian Butturini Association, presents the photos taken from this book and from another of his most famous and discussed works, “London by Gian Butturini”. In the latter, there is the period that has gone down in history such as that of Swinging London, when the English capital had become a melting pot of new trends related to fashion, music, art and culture in general.
© Gian Butturini
London, 1969
“This is an exhibition – explains Gigliola Foschi – in defense of freedom of speech, image and thought. An exhibition against a cancel culture which, without comparison and without discussion, in liberal England made the book London by Gian Butturini withdrawn from the market and muddied the figure of a man who for all his life had been committed against all forms of racism and d ‘injustice”.
It was in fact a double image with a black woman who sells metro tickets closed in a closet and a gorilla in a cage (the two photos are exhibited by Still), present in the new edition of the book (Damiani 2017), which were misrepresented by young afro british Mercedes Halliday who had received the volume as a gift. And he interpreted the two photos as a racist equation: black woman = monkey. Such a discriminatory campaign was launched that the publisher was forced to withdraw the volume from bookstores, even though he was firmly convinced that Butturini’s intention was just the opposite: it was anti-racist. And he wanted to arouse indignation at the conditions of two living beings, both rightly trapped and discriminated against.
The exhibition is completed by a series of “situationist comics”, where characters such as Batman or Nembo Kid are transformed into heroes of the counterculture.
© Gian Butturini
homeless