Bologna Portraits by Jacopo Benassi

Bologna Portraits Photographs

Jacopo Benassi Text

Antonio Grulli

Prologue – How did Bologna Portraits come about? There is no single reason why this book sees the light now. First of all, we need to start out

from the photos. The earliest go back a couple of years. I have known Jacopo for a long time, but the start of a much deeper relationship dates only to

autumn 2016, during the Artissima fair in Turin, in a bar at Porta Nuova station. I met him there to discuss a number of issues, and things started to

move very quickly. He began to frequent Bologna more and more often, and during these stays of his, as had become a habit for him by this point,

he took a lot of pictures, especially of the people whom he felt to be best suited to his lens. In next to no time, he had put together a collection of

beautiful and particularly meaningful portraits in terms of his own style and working process.

We realised this one day when he showed me the

photos that he had shot in Bologna, and we came to the conclusion that there was already enough material to produce a publication. But we decide

to take it to its most extreme consequences, producing other portraits, using the city as a subject to work on, to squeeze everything out of, just as

artists often do when they decided to focus on a single element of the reality surrounding them.

The people portrayed are largely linked to my own

everyday life, as well as that of a small group of dear friends who have spent a lot of time over recent months with Jacopo and me, and who end-

ed up being the driving force behind this project, bringing ideas, input and names, as well as collaborating crucially on the organisational level.

The subjects have highly diverse stories behind them, but they are all profoundly linked to the life of the city. They are the ones who have ‘made’

Bologna what it is today and over recent years in one way or another. This does not mean that all the people who are doing something in Bologna