#2 [ENG] Portrait of Mario De Biasi

Have you ever rediscovered, after years, an old photograph pasted on the cardboard page of an album? A simple image can suddenly bring back unexpected memories, almost as if it wanted to talk to us. Here De Biasi chooses himself as the subject; the well-fastened raincoat, his hair a bit ruffled, but above all... a camera in his hands. That instrument, as Bruno Munari said, would become a natural extension of his own person.Silvia De Biasi, the photographer’s daughter and co-curator of this exhibition, reveals the beginnings of the young photographer.“This photo is particularly significant to me. I discovered its story myself only after my father’s death, tidying up his vast archive. What you see is his first self-portrait, taken in 1945 in Nuremberg, Germany. My father is looking at the camera with an expression somewhere between desire and respect: he’s madly in love with it. Next to the image, we see written, "My dream is here" in German and Italian, alongside the small drawing of a camera.My father was born in 1923 in a small village just outside Belluno. Orphaned at the age of ten, he moved to Milan, where he earned a diploma as a radio technician and then worked at Magneti Marelli in Sesto San Giovanni. In 1944, right in the middle of war, he was sent to do forced labour at Siemens in Nuremberg. There, among the rubble of the bombed city, he found some photographic paper, some chemical developers and a book on photography. That was enough to trigger his deepest curiosity.He was lucky to discover that the person who took him into his home was an enthusiast of photography, who could provide him with his first technical rudiments. As a self-taught beginner, my father instantly understood that photography was his passion... his dream!Everything began from this dream-turned-reality."