#5 [ENG] The Girl of 1956

What attracts us to other people’s lives? Today social networks have made us accustomed to a constant display of the exceptional, alienating us from the intimacy of everyday life.In an era like the fifties when social networks were still science fiction, Mario De Biasi sought a new normality after the devastating years of the war, finding it in the daily life of a typical Milanese girl next door. The photograph is one of about 20 shots in a reportage, of which the client and the identity of the young woman portrayed remain unknown.Let’s listen to Maria Vittoria Baravelli, who will help us uncover more about this photograph and this fragment of life.“This image, as well as the reportage of which it’s part, is evidence of a historic transition.While not adhering expressly to Neorealism, some instances of it pervade De Biasi’s work, since he devoted himself to documenting with equal enthusiasm, both the great events of history and their protagonists, and the small, insignificant world of everyday details. As for the latter, De Biasi’s images allow us to follow a young woman's day from the moment she gets up in the morning. In the course of her daily rituals, in front of our eyes, she follows a path around the symbolic places of a Milan whose marvels the girl gradually rediscovers. Here then is the Duomo, Teatro Alla Scala, the Castello Sforzesco, Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, but also, as in this case, the shop windows. From one image to the next, every girl could, and still can, see herself in this normal life. And Milan becomes the ideal backdrop to affirm these rediscovered everyday rhythms, but also with a sense of possibility for it is, in fact, yesterday as today, the city of opportunities where anything can happen.”