Giulia Morassutti’s exhibition stems from this desire. While the heart of Fotografica has always been the human being—observed in their fragility, their connections, their transformations, and their unyielding dignity—Giulia captures its spirit and interprets it through a personal, intimate, and rigorous perspective. In her portraits, every face becomes a threshold, a presence that asks to be seen. Giulia approaches people with care and sensitivity, seeking to capture something that belongs to a single moment: an expression, an emotion, the way in which each person chooses to present themselves or, for an instant, to let themselves be seen. Within the spaces of the Monastero del Carmine—which have been shaped over the centuries by different lives and stories—“L’Attimo Fuggente” invites us to pause before these faces and reflect on time and our relationships with others. This is the meaning we continue to ascribe to Fotografica: to tell the story of the world through people’s stories and to create, around these images, opportunities for connection and reflection.
THE FLEETING MOMENT
For five hundred years, the halls of the ancient Carmine Monastery have been filled with footsteps, faces, and diverse stories. From a religious community to the strategic presence of Bergamo’s Teatro Tascabile, these walls have breathed life into countless narratives, and this central theme lies at the heart of an exhibition of photographs by Giulia Morassutti, who seeks to give form and permanence to the lives she has encountered, come to know, or merely brushed against. For if the portrait is the art of making a presence visible, the TTB accomplishes the same feat through the living bodies of actresses and actors, but with one difference: the theatrical portrait cannot be preserved; it must be recreated and reimagined each time, and it is precisely in this that its strength lies, while Giulia’s photographs express the desire to freeze the moment, in the awareness of the fleeting nature of existence. The fleeting moment is the one the gaze cannot capture, because it often slips away before we can even reach it. The photographer and the subject stand on equal footing, with the camera between them, capturing the instant, crystallizing it, and reifying it, thereby making it eternal. Each of Giulia’s photographs stems from a specific intent: the desire to capture the essence of the person standing before her, with the awareness that their presence there, at that moment, is something that will never happen again—a unique moment in the timeline. The portraits of the people featured—mostly in black and white—depict friendships, family relationships, and even chance encounters. They are always close-ups, as if to confirm what Ronald Barthes wrote in *Camera Lucida*: “The punctum of a photograph is that fatality which, in it, pricks me” (but also “wounds me, seizes me”). That fatality, in fact, stems from the gaze of the other, which Giulia seeks by taking upon herself the responsibility for the fleeting nature of time. For each face, there is one shot—at most two—a rigorous choice imposed by a discipline that allows for no exceptions. A raw truth emerges in her photographs: a life very different from that found in glossy magazines. For those who view the photographs, they will appear as luminous records of lives in transit, exposed—physically and metaphorically—in their vulnerability, which, through their faces, call into question the photographer’s responsibility. What is to be done with the face of the other? One can possess it, capturing it in an image; embrace it, allowing it to appear in its otherness; or create it, constructing it through interpretation. Giulia embraces it, giving it space, in a two-way relationship: for her, recognizing the other also means recognizing herself. In a frenetic, chaotic, fragmented life—one whose finitude she never forgets—the artist seeks to illuminate and give form to the infinite possibilities, emotions, and experiences of each individual, and her choice of the photographic portrait as the medium through which she captures them is the culmination of this “objective.” When the famous orator and philosopher Cicero used the verb “retraho”—from which the word “portrait” derives—the meaning he ascribed to this term was “to tear someone away from themselves, to bring them back into the present”; this is precisely what Giulia’s portraits do. Photography captures the stillness of a moment within the continuous flow of time, a way to allow a fleeting moment of our lives to transcend the passage of time; in this sense, the presence of portraits of two people taken years apart speaks not only to the passage of life—and even of death—but also to the endurance of relationships as a fundamental aspect of our humanity, and to the fact that, to quote Montale, we turn precisely to the presence of an image so as not to “sever that face.”
GIULIA MORASSUTTI
Giulia Morassutti (2000) discovered her passion for photography at the Manzù Art High School in Bergamo, which she has attended since 2015. After graduating in 2019, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice but left in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, later transferring to the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, where she studied painting and printmaking. Her exhibition career began early: at age eighteen, she won first prize (high school division) at the “Don Sergio Colombo Award” with an installation and a travel journal, exhibited in 2018 at the former Oratory of St. Lupo in Bergamo. In 2022, she participated in the group exhibition “Qualcosa del genere” at the Tullio Carrara Cultural Center in Nembro, which earned her an invitation to a solo exhibition: in 2023, she held her first solo show, “Inside Out,” curated by Giovanna Brambilla, at the same center. The exhibition marked the beginning of an artistic exploration increasingly centered on the face of the other, the central theme of her work.
