Gabriele Basilico (1944–2013)

Perhaps, the death of the photographer Gabriele Basilico yesterday marks the end of a certain way of looking at our cities. Basilico was an outstanding, neutral, intelligent and profound observer who saw the masses of buildings (i.e. the city) as something constructed by humans but that no longer needed them to survive. Taken with passion but no rhetoric as he criss-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. On a more personal level, Gabriele Basilico was a real person, a craftsman of images far removed from all those calculating personas who do one thing when they mean another.

Rumours were that his hidden agenda was quite simply to photograph all the great cities of the world — an agenda that may seem a utopia (à la Borges) but one he may well have attained — future generations will have to tell us.

His first photographs, those of the factories in Milan, focused on the buildings but already featured an urban anonymity. By contrast, his pictures of the great DATAR project portray ports in northern France where he captured the landscape and coastal boundary as well as the cities. He was constantly pursuing boundaries, physical lines, the primeval signs that underpin every place. He believed there had to be a design superintending things.

He also photographed Rome, ports and ships, Beirut, Silicon Valley, the textiles in traditional American houses, the Trentino valleys, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, railway lines and canals, and factories in Sesto San Giovanni and Berlin. The chronological order of his urban projects is of little importance because there seems to be no evolution or even progression. There is nothing old and nothing new in the cities; his cities are facts, things and records, the product of an ancient human anthropological and social need, which is proximity.

We should also mention the remarkable pictures he took for an Electa book on Michelangelo's architecture, the sculptural effects of which he highlighted brilliantly using different angles and light. Many will remember the selection Basilico presented at the last Venice Architecture Biennale Common Ground, after photographing the national pavilions in the Giardini — perhaps an intentional homage to the Bechers?

I cannot think of any of his pictures showing people and I presume he worked early in the morning because the shadows are nearly always long. His photographs of central Milan were probably taken in the deserted dog days of August. Nearly all of Basilico's portfolio is black and white, and only recently had he started using colour, demonstrating, among other things, that the city-product is essentially colourless.

I do not believe you can separate Basilico's photographs from his time. Just as Atget's photographs show a disappearing Paris in the wake of demolition, Feininger's showcase the business-focused New York rising to the sky and Stoller's comment on the 1950s-60s occupation of the American soil, I think Basilico is telling us of a compact city that is returning, as is a new collective awareness of the beauty of urban design.

He did not seem overly interested in landmarks and the phantasmagorical objects that are hugely popular today and compete for the temporary visibility in cities before fading into oblivion; but he must be praised for having managed to bring strange objects back within the bounds of normality, lessening their spectacular traits and portraying them simply in collective situations, along with their travelling companions. Cities with their streets, squares and transport lines, their roofs, walls, façades, street levels, arches and long perspectives — these are the subjects for which we, lovers of the city in all its different permutations, shall gratefully remember Gabriele Basilico. Sebastiano Brandolini