MILANO.- Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia presents the exhibition Dies Irae, photographs by Paolo Pellegrin from February 18 through May 15 2011. Throughout his career Paolo Pellegrin received innumerable international prizes and awards that are indicative of how the strength and intelligence of his works can live through time as parts of a greater, coherent and universal picture.

Pellegrin represents a new generation of photographers that are aware of the modern means of production and distribution of images at their disposal. They operate to offer a new way to look at the facts they document, always maintaining their ethics in the form and methods of their job.

Pellegrin always uses a metaphor to speak about his job: photography to him is like a language we wish to learn. An unfamiliar language, perhaps of an unknown stock, whose mystery fascinates and draws us towards it. Little by little the mystery reveals its features allowing those who work with it (the photographers) to use it as a prop to tell stories.

Paolo Pellegrin has narrated many of them. At times these stories were harsh, even tragic, and spoke of war, detention and natural disasters. Pellegrin approached each and every one of them without judging, following with his eyes what was happening around him in order to interpret it in the light of his extensive experience as a journalist and of his sensitivity as a human being.

This exhibition is the first great retrospective dedicated to the work of this photographer and it gathers, in more than 200 pictures, many of his stories and reportages that have become the emblem of a pure photojournalism, that is not afraid of documenting the world by looking it in the eyes.

“My duty – my responsibility – is to create an archive of our collective memory”, says Pellegrin. No one but him has been able to renew the teachings and principles of the photojournalistic tradition to translate them into a new language; that of the 20th century.

Paolo Pellegrin was born in Rome in 1964. He starts photographing in the 80s and in 1999 he enters Magnum Photos of which he became a member in 2005. He covers international and public news for some of the main newspapers. In 1995 he wins the World Press Photo (category “Daily Life”) for his reportage on AIDS in Uganda. This is just the first of a long series of awards such as the Kodak Young Photographer Award, the Visa D’Or of Perpignan, the WPP 2000 (category “People in the News”) for his work on Kosovo and the prestigious Hasselblad Grant, among others. In 2002 he won the Hansel-Meith Award and the WPP, category “People in the News”. In 2005 he wins another WPP, category “Portraits-Stories”. He recently published the book As I was dying and participated into Magnum’s collective exhibition Access to life. He published Cambogia with MSF and Kosovo: The Flight of Reason.