In the summer of 1970, when he was still unsure of the direction his life should take, Gabriele Basilico undertook a long car journey to Iran, together with a group of friends. He had two cameras with him, and his idea was to make a reportage of his journey with the hope of then selling it to some newspaper. His visual reference points were the great photographers of the Magnum agency, and the tradition of photojournalism. Even with the distance inherent in the images of Iran in comparison with the style he was to develop in later years, in these images Basilico implicitly declares his fascination with the geometry of buildings. City life and architectural space alternate in his photographs, and “Iran 1970” remains, as Luca Doninelli has written, an important essay on “Basilico-before-Basilico”.

Giovanna Calvenzi, 2016