Gypsies is without a doubt one of the most important works of photography of the 20th century.

Last Thursday, Fondazione FORMA per la fotografia opened the much-anticipated “Gypsies by Josef Koudelka”, a world premier exhibition of the work of Josef Koudelka based on his seminal 20th century monograph, Gypsies, the artist’s 9-year photographic survey of the gypsy communities of Eastern Europe. The exhibition revisits the artist’s original intention for the work, based on the original sequencing and maquette prepared in 1968 by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva. Koudelka intended to publish the work in Prague, but was forced to flee Czechoslovakia, landing eventually in Paris and leaving the book long unpublished. In 1975, Robert Delpire, Aperture, and Koudelka collaborated to publish Gitans, la fin du voyage (Gypsies, in the English-language edition), a selection of sixty photographs taken in various Roma settlements around East Slovakia. Robert Delpire is currently the subject of  a multi-venue career retrospective exhibition in New York City.

FORMA‘s exhibition of this work calls upon Aperture’s expanded edition, featuring 109 photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971. Printed under close supervision of the artist, expressly for Forma, the images on view recount the everyday life of gypsy communities in the sixties in Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and occasionally France and Spain.

This exhibit is presented in collaboration with Magnum Photos.

Gypsies by Josef Koudelka
On view through September 16, 2012

Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia
Milan, Italy
39 02.5811.8067

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›› Buy Gypsies by Josef Koudelka (Aperture 2011) for 30% off
›› From the 2011 archive, TIME Lightbox reviews Josef Koudelka’s Gypsies, Revisited

April 26 through June 17, the Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia hosts two compelling exhibitions: The Suffering of Light, Photographs by Alex Webb, as well as Magnum Contact Sheets.
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Alex Webb’s latest monograph The Suffering of Light, published by Aperture in spring of 2011, is a retrospective of his 30-year “photographic dialogue with the streets.” This Spring’s exhibition of his body of work at Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Milan brings together this same thirty years of photography and journalism, further celebrating Webb’s use of dense, vivid colors to tell stories about places and situations in some of the most unusual corners of the world.

The self-termed “street photographer” describes the practice of assembling three decades of his works in color as an exercise in exploring “the dominant obsession of [his] photographic life… a particular way of seeing in color.” A trip to Haiti in 1975 incited change in his way of seeing, since driving the photographer toward localities where “light and color are essential to understanding and describing the territory.” Color emerged as a language closer to his own sensibilities, since becoming an essential choice in his visual storytelling.

“Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized there was another emotional note that had to be reckoned with: the intense, vibrant color of these worlds. Searing light and intense color seemed somehow embedded in the cultures that I had begun working in, so utterly different from the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. Since then, I have worked predominantly in color.” – Alex Webb

Curated by Alessandra Mauro, The Suffering of Light: Photographs by Alex Webb is on view April 26 through June 17 at Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Milan, accompanied by a weekend workshop on May 5th and 6th, entitled “Milan: Finding Your Vision.”

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In simultaneity, Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia will host Magnum Contact Sheets, an exhibition that presents forty of the most important, and most valuable, contact sheets by great artists of Magnum Photos, alongside their respective final images. The selected contact sheets, shown with notes by the artists themselves, construct a revealing narrative, retracing the artist’s creative process of shooting and choosing. In a The Telegraph UK review of the 2011 publication, it is noted that Henri Cartier-Bresson, cooperative founder of Magnum, speaks of the contact sheet as “a little like a psychoanalyst’s casebook.” Also on the subject of the contact sheet as an intimate document of the artist, Belgian photographer Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, confesses:

“I feel that by allowing myself to be violated [sic], and by publishing that which is most intimate, I am taking the very real risk of breaking the spell, of destroying a certain mystery.”

At a time when digital photography has dramatically changed the way photographers work, the exhibition recalls an entirely different way of approaching photography; contact sheets allowed photographers to look back through the lens of time across visual memories of an event, a time, and a particular state of being.

The Suffering of the Light: Photographs by Alex Webb and
Magnum Contact Sheets
April 26 through June 17

Milan: Finding Your Vision
A Weekend Workshop with Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb
Friday, May 4th, 6:30PM
Saturday, May 5th and Sunday, May 6th, 10AM – 6PM

Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia
Milan, Italy