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An exhibition on LIFE magazine photographer David Lees True to LIFE
[Maddalena Delli]
Anyone interested in Florentine art as well as Italian culture should not miss visiting the beautiful exhibition of David Lees's photographs in the Sala delle Reali Poste until the end of November. The exhibition displays 130 prints in black and white and in color, whose sizes range from medium to large. They are chronologically arranged to represent the whole of Lees's career.David Lees was born in Tuscany in 1917 of two British artists: Edward Gordon Craig, the famous theater actor and director, and Dorothy Neville Lees, a poetess. Already a published photographer at the time, he first started working for LIFE as an assistant photographer when the magazine editors decided to dedicate their 1945 Christmas issue - which was to be their very first color issue - to the famed frescos by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi chapel in Florence. The six-page coverage was a great success and Lees was asked to also help in documenting Piero della Francesca's frescos in Arezzo and the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.
He then started working in the LIFE offices in Rome, undertaking a variety of tasks until his first proper assignment as a photographer: he was asked to cover the wedding of a girl in Southern Italy, who was getting married to her wartime American sweetheart. Lees's heart-warming images were a huge success, and a star was born. From that moment and until 1972, when the publication of LIFE magazine came to an end due to the overwhelming competition of television, Lees's photographs appeared in more than one hundred issues of the national and international editions of the magazine. After the end of LIFE, Lees chose to bend his photographic skill to advertsing. He still lives in Florence.
Lees's technical skill and fine pictorial eye enabled him to take memorable shots, while his sensitive nature, fine education and engaging character made him welcome in the most difficult quarters - including the Vatican - and enabled him to speak to the hearts and minds of a mass readership.
Lees's LIFE photographs document two and a half crucial decades of Italian fashion, parties, elections, disasters, art and celebrities as seen by the world. He portrayed dozens of big names in the fields of industry (Gianni Agnelli, Adriano Olivetti, Enrico Piaggio), fashion (Armani, Pucci, Ferragamo) and culture (Berenson, Pound, Montale, Fellini, Dalě) as well as hundreds of ordinary people and all sorts of social and historic events great and small - the latest news and the timeless. Indeed, looking back on his work we can now see how instrumental the eye of Lees's camera may have been in establishing a large number of the American - and therefore international - stereotypes regarding Italian life and culture.
David Lees
Italy through the photographs of LIFE
Sale delle Reali Poste
(entrance from the Loggia of the Uffizi)
Until November 30th
Open 10 am to 6 pm
Closed Mondays
Free admission
Info 055.2776406
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