Collezione Ettore Molinario

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Collezione Ettore Molinario

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01/12/2026

Katy Grannan turned her lens to Humboldt County, drawn to its remoteness and untamed landscapes; located roughly five hours north of San Francisco, the region remains largely wild, with dense forests, rugged coastline, and rivers. Known as a haven for those seeking solitude, it attracts unconventional residents, free spirits, and people seeking a close connection with nature.

In her series “Mad River”, Grannan photographs these inhabitants, often bringing them into a studio with a vivid red carpet where they play with fashion photography conventions, while quietly bending its rules.

Katy Grannan, “Evie, Arcata, CA”, 2025, United States, pigment print, 60x40 cm, ed. 1/3

12/29/2025

Imre von Santho, active mostly in Berlin from the early 1930s through the 1940s, shaped European fashion photography working with models and movie stars, using experimental techniques and bold framing.

In this context, even a simple accessory like a glove becomes a rich symbol, capable of conveying both elegance and social meaning. Myth places the origin of the glove in the intervention of the Graces, who wrapped perfumed bandages around the wounded fingers of Venus. Over time, this intimate object absorbed meanings of authority, allegiance, and social ritual, circulating between courtly gesture and codified power.

Imre Von Santho, “Gloves model Duda”, 1930 ca., Germany, vintage gelatin silver print, 28x22 cm

12/18/2025

📸 Justine Tjallinks, "Haze (from 'Modern Times' series), 2025, Netherlands, archival pigment print, ed. 2/10.

With "Modern Times", Justine Tjallinks constructs a photographic language rooted in the logic of classical portraiture and developed through contemporary means.
Images that are built slowly, with an attention to light, color and surface that aligns photography with the temporal depth of painting. Historical echoes appear through compositional rigor and tonal restraint, guiding the sitter’s posture, gesture, and gaze to create a presence that is deliberate and quietly compelling.
Styling and costume generate a sense of suspended time, positioning the subject between eras and contributing to the temporal ambiguity that defines the series.

12/08/2025

Achille Volpe (Volpè), "Grisha and Brona", 1930 ca., United States, vintage gelatin silver print, 35x27 cm.

This photograph by Achille Volpe portrays the dance duo Grisha & Brona, performers active between the 1930s and mid-1940s within the world of vaudeville, cabaret, and nightclub entertainment.
Their acts combined stylized movement, theatrical posing, elaborate costuming, to evoke the exotic and orientalist imagery that characterized a significant part of interwar stage culture. They were known for highly constructed numbers – sometimes inspired by imagined Eastern motifs, sometimes built around symbolic tableaux – where choreography, costume, and stage presence merged into a cohesive, provocative, visually striking whole.

11/28/2025

George Hurrell, "Greta Garbo in Romance (1930)", 1930 ca., United States, vintage gelatin silver print, 25x20 cm.

George Hurrell arrived at MGM Studios in the late ’20s, already skilled in controlling studio lighting with precision. He saw each negative as a first draft, sculpting the final image with meticulous hand-retouching in the darkroom – a standard practice of the era, but his skill and consistency gave rise to the unmistakable “Hurrell look.”

Greta Garbo, famously elusive on set, trusted very few photographers – and Hurrell was one of them. Their sessions were almost ritualistic: few words, measured movements, him shaping the geometry of her pose while she subtly controlled the mood.

11/22/2025

Opening today at "FRAGILITY. The Dance of Life and Death", curated by with

“A show that invites us to perceive the intrinsic complementarity and the necessary coexistence of these principles within the very fabric of permanence, vibrant and alive. Eros and Thanatos do not confront each other in conflict, but dance together: they seek one another, seduce, accept, merge, and mutually reflect.”

Collezione Ettore Molinario is delighted to take part with two works: Noé Sendas, "Crystal Girl N. 55", 2013, Germany, inkjet pigment print, 30x24 cm, ed. 1/2, and Roberto Baccarini, "Untitled", 1930 ca., Italy, vintage gelatin silver print, 22x16 cm.

Photo by

sendas

11/18/2025

📸 Roberto Baccarini, "Untitled", 1930 ca., Italy, vintage gelatin silver print, 22x16 cm.

Milan in the early 1930s pulsed with transformation. Industrial expansion, modern architecture, and a thriving cultural scene made the city a laboratory for visual innovation. In this milieu, Roberto Baccarini distinguished himself through his studio work and his involvement in the emerging photographic scene.
He was part of S.F.R.A.I. (Studi Fotografici Riuniti Artistico-Industriali), a collective that fused artistic experimentation with industrial documentation; factories, contemporary architecture, theatrical portraits, each subject received the same meticulous attention to composition, lighting, and form.

Among Baccarini’s notable sitters we remember Wanda Osiris, Italy’s pioneering and legendary diva of light entertainment, a figure whose audacity and style helped shape Milanese culture – the same inventive spirit that runs through Baccarini’s photography.

11/17/2025

A collection is never just a neutral assemblage of photographs: it is a constantly evolving mosaic, a biographical map, where each image interacts with the others. In the case of the Collezione Ettore Molinario, this interaction extends to ancient sculptures.
This is the perspective of the collector-philosopher, here, Ettore Molinario, who recognises photography as a means of both representation and preserving feelings, impulses and memories. Each image carries with it a part of the person who chose it, and forms part of a broader discourse that encompasses evolving identity and the relationship between the present and the past.

Text by Paola Sammartano

11/11/2025

At Les Franciscaines, Deauville, the Planches Contact Festival presents “Le théâtre de l’intime”, celebrating the encounter between Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun – joined by two works from the Ettore Molinario Collection.

"Cahun, an avant-garde surrealist, blurs the boundaries of gender and identity through self-portraiture: a shifting ‘I’, cross-dressed and androgynous, transforming intimacy into a space of reinvention and ambiguity.
Sherman, who pays homage to her, takes a different approach: beginning in the 1970s with her ‘Film Stills’, she embodies feminine stereotypes drawn from cinema and the media, questioning the social construction of identity.”

Claude Cahun, “Autoportrait au chat”, 1927, France, 11x18 cm, vintage gelatin silver print, unique piece.
Cindy Sherman, “Untitled #127/A”, 1983, United States, 83x54 cm, cibachrome print, ed. 5/18.

Photo by
deauville

10/31/2025

📸 Anonymous, "Silvana Mangano (in Le Streghe)", 1967, Italy, vintage gelatin silver print, 25x20 cm.

An anonymous photograph captures Silvana Mangano on the set of "Le Streghe" (1967), a film conceived by five master directors, each crafting an episode around her and revealing different facets of her enigmatic presence.
From Visconti’s restless diva to Bolognini’s calculating woman, Pasolini’s poetic Assurdina Cai, Rossi’s spirited figure, and De Sica’s weary wife, Mangano threads the film together with a subtle and commanding magnetism that earned her the David di Donatello for Best Actress.

Here, she channels the essence of the witch: not in the supernatural, but in her uncanny power – the way she can charm and unsettle simultaneously, holding a gaze that invites curiosity yet keeps at respectful distance.

10/21/2025

📸 Jacques Henri Lartigue, "Monte Carlo Beach, Août", 1955, Monaco, archival digital print, 60x50 cm, ed. 6/20.

Jacques Henri Lartigue spent his life chasing what the 20th century often overlooked: joy.
From the age of seven, he experimented with stereoscopic photography, multiple exposures, and rapid shuttered speeds, trying to catch the "miracle" of movement – a body leaping, a car seeming to fly, a dress caught mid-air.
His famous albums read like a diary of curiosity, happiness and wonder, capturing a world that refused to take itself too seriously.

Lartigue's work remained largely unrecognized until 1963, when the MoMA in New York held his first solo exhibition. It was there that Richard Avedon discovered his photographs and was deeply struck: "It was one of the most moving experiences in my life... You took me into your world, and isn't that, after all, the purpose of art?"

10/09/2025

📸 György Kepes, "Juliet in Shadow Cage", 1938, United States, vintage gelatin silver print, 36 x 28 cm.

György Kepes moved fluidly between photography, design and education. He collaborated with the legendary Lázló Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, and later founded the Centre for Advance Visual Studies at MIT, where artists and scientists explored new ways to connect technology and human perception.

Kepes believed that seeing was a form of thinking. In "Language of Vision" (1944), he argued that images don't just illustrate ideas, they build them. Visual order, rhythm and contrast are not mere aesthetic details, but tools to understand how the world Is structured.
In this photograph of his wife, the artist and illustrator Juliet Appleby Kepes, her head enclosed in a metal cage, the image becomes both experiment and metaphor – a study in perception and constraint.

The camera as an instrument to think with it, to question how we see, and what seeing means.

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Milan, OH

Website

http://collezionemolinario.com/en/

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