On February 13 we published the news about the death, at 69 years old, the Italian photographer, and trained architect, Gabriele Basilico, one of the highest notaries of urban landscape and transformations of the great cities of the last four decades. We bring some monographs and exhibition catalogs on his great work.

Gabriele Basilico (b.1944-2013) is one of the most important Italian photographers. Coming from the long-established tradition of landscape art, his is an idiosyncratic representation of architecture and landscape. His photographs of cityscapes, residential buildings and factories seem to deny the presence of the artist and ask viewers to form their own conclusions about relationships between structures, and between structures and landscape.

Stripping bare the urban context of any human activity, his work transcends mere instances and seeks to reveal the very essence of place and of our relationship with it. Basilico is one of the best-known 'documentary' photographers in Europe, he eschews the traditional picturesque forms of landscape imagery and turns his attention instead to the city and the industralized landscape photographed in black and white and with a precision and clarity that is almost alarming. An architect by training, his camera imposes discipline on the buildings it focuses on - he banishes human life to reveal the life of the building itself.

Basilico travels extensively and in-depth, often working with government bodies to catalogue the appearance of the urban landscape for posterity. Basilico travelled to Berlin in 1990, where he documented the gradual demolition of the Berlin Wall. In 1991 he worked in Beirut, capturing the life and remnants of a city after years of war had taken its toll. His work is a unique pictorial record of a particular time, he avoids romanticism yet manages to reveal the hidden rhythm and life of the modern urban environment.

 
Arquitecturas, ciudades, visiones : reflexiones sobre la fotografía Basilico, Gabriele
Madrid : La Fábrica, 2008.
Gabriele Basilico and Dan Graham: Unidentified Modern City by Graham, Dan (Artist); Bovier, Lionel (Editor); Bortolotti, Maurizio (Editor); di Basilico, Gabriele (Artist). Zurich : JRP Ringier, 2011.
Gabriele Basilico : intercity : premio internacional de fotografía de arquitectura 2007, Fundación Astroc, by Basilico, Gabriele; La Fabrica Staff (Editor). Madrid : La fábrica, DL 2008.
 Gabriele Basilico - Silicon Valley, by Sandra Phillips and Filippo Maggia (2008).
Gabriele Basilico (Monographs). Francesco Bonami. Phaidon Press (2006).
Gabriele Basilico was born in Milan, Italy (12 August 1944, ibidem, 13 February 2013). He has photographed all over Europe and the world, including a project commissioned by the French government to document changes in the national landscape in 1984 and a project photographing devastated Beirut in 1991. He was awarded the “Grand Prix International du Mois de La Photo” in 1990 and won the top prize for the Sixth Exhibition of Architecture of the Venice Biennial by the international jury. He has exhibited widely across Europe and the United States, including a retrospective of his work from 1984-1999 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2000 and a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008. He has published many books including “Porti di Mare” and “Berlin,” for which he was awarded the prize of the year's best photography book by PhotoEspagna in June of 2002.

His work can be found in the National Library of France, at the MAXXI in Rome, at the University of Palma and in various European and American museums.
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