The project brings together a selection of works from the photography collection of Alessandro Malerba, one of Italy's most active collectors and president of the Malerba Fund for Photography, which promotes contemporary photography as an art form, committed to the preservation and dissemination of contemporary photographic heritage and supporting new generations of artists.

 

The fOn Art Gallery showcases works spanning two centuries of photography, from early 19th-century visions to international contemporary art, offering the public a broad, coherent, and poetic perspective on the narrative power of the image. Alessandro Malerba, who defines himself as "neither a pure collector nor a pure patron," considers the collection an active tool for participation in contemporary art, the fruit of a constant dialogue with artists and the present".

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With this exhibition, the Oelle Foundation continues the Collezione in Fondazione project, aiming not only to make visible works held in warehouses, galleries, museums, storage facilities, and homes, but also to forge a relationship with the local community, bringing collectors out of their niche and making their treasures accessible.

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"The Images I Preserve" opens with rare historical photographs of Sicily during the Grand Tour, by photographers such as Giorgio Sommer, Giuseppe Incorpora, James Anderson, and Giovanni Crupi, depicting a Mediterranean landscape in transformation, a visual testimony to the birth of Southern Italy's modern identity. Alongside these images, a selection of great Italian masters of the late twentieth century, such as Gabriele Basilico, Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Mimmo Jodice, Massimo Vitali, and others, depicts an urban, intimate Italy, traversed by cultural tensions and social transformations.

 

The project also encompasses an international perspective, with a significant body of work from Japan (including Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Naoya Hatakeyama) and Western photography (Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Edward Weston), demonstrating Malerba's interest in photography as a global language and a tool for reflecting on the present. At the heart of it all is the idea that collecting is not merely about preserving, but about creating a narrative, a legacy, a cultural responsibility. For this reason, the exhibition also includes the works of young photographers Giulia Iacolutti and Alessandra Leta, winners of the Mila Prize for Contemporary Photography, promoted by the Malerba Fund, founded in 2004 with the aim of supporting visual culture and the new generation of artists.