Jacopo Benassi: Bologna Portraits

Bologna Portraits is the portrait of one of the most charming and least well-known Italian cities portrayed through the faces of the people who live there today. It started during the artist’s many stays in the town. Discovering Bologna little by little, Jacopo Benassi took pictures, like a sort of notebook, of the faces of the most interesting people he met during his time there. After a few months he already had a large portfolio of people which, like in a mosaic, built a bigger portrait of the whole city today. Bologna is probably the best-kept secret of the Italian cities with a great past. Large-scale tourism has never affected it, but in recent years it has been discovered by a growing group of sophisticated travellers passionate about art, culture, cinema and food. The portraits are a mix of young artists, writers, minor and great musicians, leading businessmen, famous bar tenders, tailors, professors at the local university (the oldest in the Western world), personalities and international artists such as Nino Migliori and Luigi Ontani. All of them born or living in Bologna. The whole book is a study of real faces that are able to be meaningful and to tell a story, and recall a tradition like the study of faces by Pier Paolo Pasolini in some of his films, or Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. But at the same time, they recall a masterpiece like Un Paese, the book produced by Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini. The book includes a text by art critic Antonio Grulli.

Jacopo Benassi is one of the most prolific and talented Italian photograher. His work has the camera at its centre but he touches on languages such as performance, video, curating, and sound. Benassi has worked with some of the most legendary international musicians of the international punk and post-punk scene. During his career he has worked, among the others, for Rolling Stone, Purple Magazine, GQ, Vice, Wired, ICONPanorama, Riders, just to name a few. In his most recent show, Is It MY Body?, at the Galleria Francesca Minini in Milano, his work was exhibited alongside artworks by Roger Ballen, Vanessa Beecroft and Dan Graham.