Mario de Biasi: Reading

Mario De Biasi, born in 1923, became the undisputed leader of the photo journalism movement during his long association with Epoca. With his camera lens De Biasi has carefully and poetically captured people reading in every sort of situation around the world. And here we have a kind of short circuit: leafing through the pages of a book of photography, whose subject is reading. Reading means culture, pause, amusement, information, study, escape, subtle pleasure; it means being able to forget about time. Can you learn to read by watching people reading? Perhaps you can, but you cannot be cured of reading. It is a chronic and perhaps infectious disease. De Biasi concludes his reading project with seventy black and white pictures, the fruit of forty years of travels and encounters. It is a universal story told by cultured people reading, from Saudi Arabia to the United States. A social panorama that leaves space for reflection, reflection on reading as an inescapable and vital act, a liason that unites and brings together peoples and traditions as only knowledge is able to do.