LONDON, ENGLAND.-The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art presents Viewpoints - Italy in Black and White, on view through September 4, 2005. Selected from the Prelz Oltramonti Collection – an outstanding private archive of photographs by the most important modern and contemporary Italian masters – this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to admire and explore the work of such artists as Giuseppe Cavalli, Ugo Mulas, Mimmo Jodice and Mario Giacomelli.

Spanning fifty years from the early 1930s to the beginning of the 1980s, the exhibition’s wide range of powerful and evocative imagery also includes the street scenes and portraiture of Giorgio Avigdor and Mario Gabinio, and the experimental, avant-garde photography of Antonio Boggeri and Luigi Veronesi.

Giuseppe Cavalli (1904-1961) was the leading force in Italian photography from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, creating unforgettable images of Italian people and places. During the war he moved to the provincial town of Senigallia where he met, and became the mentor of, Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000), the most respected Italian photographer of his generation.

Ugo Mulas (1928-1973) was an outstanding photographer whose work was instrumental in shaping the work of a whole generation of Italian photographers and his magnificent portraits of artists such as Burri, Fontana and Calder are internationally acclaimed.

The exhibition also presents an extraordinary body of images by Mimmo Jodice, including a number of portraits and photographs dating from the mid-1960s, the earliest taken by him. Jodice, who was born in 1934, is recognised as the most important living Italian photographer and one of the few whose work is known, exhibited and collected worldwide.

The exhibition is curated by Antonella Russo and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by Skira, Milan.