BOOK:Gabriele Basilico, SKIRA Publications

The death of Gabriele Basilico marks the end of a certain way of looking at our cities. Gabriele Basilico originally studied Architecture before turning in photography. His initial works focused around traditional landscape photography, but he later shifted his focus to architectural photography due to the influence of his previous studies in architecture. Trough 187 photos the book “I listen to your heart, city”, by SKIRA Publications, follows the evolution of Basilico’s artistic language in his favored theme the urban landscape and its changes. The publication is a journey across the globe documenting 50 cities and metropolises starting from his first project “Milano. Ambiente urbano” (1978-80) dedicated to the Isola neighborhood and the D.A.T.A.R. mission that consisted in documenting France’s social and geographical territory, trough Beirut (1991) in the wake of the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war, when the bleak formality of the bullet-riddled, empty arcades was captured only with available light to his latest series in Milan again exploring the changes of the neighborhood of his first project. Basilico was an outstanding, neutral, intelligent and profound observer who saw the masses of buildings as something constructed by humans but that no longer needed them to survive. Taken with passion but no rhetoric as he crossed the globe, his photographs are both objective and give us an understanding of the urban phenomenon of which we did not know we were capable.-Efi Michalarou