"The axis around which Italian photography spins", that is what the authoritative Piergiorgio Branzi wrote some years ago about Lanfranco Colombo. He was wrong: indeed, it wasn’t about Italian photography, but European and even more than that. On 13 April 1967, in via Brera, right into the heart of the artistic Milan, Lanfranco Colombo inaugurated his gallery "Il Diaframma", dedicated exclusively to photography, the first initiative of this kind in Europe. For those times, it was a revolution. Colombo wasn’t a professional photograph, indeed he was a manager in the steel sector. Anyway, photography was his passion and he practicized it with interesting results, as can be seen in the section dedicated to him (see "Tenant of a brothel in Istanbul, 1982) of the exhibition "The diaphragm of Lanfranco Colombo. Masters of Photography", organized by the 3M Foundation, open until 8 January 2006 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

There are the now historical pictures, like the one by Umberto Negri dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, showing some workers on a water pipeline, a document from older days accompanied by the abstract elegance of Luigi Veronesi’s photogram dated 1936. There is the section dedicated to big war events, to begin with the celebrated "Death of a militian" by Robert Capa (Spain, 1936) but also the battle of Stalingrad by Georgij Zelma (1942) or Berlin’s occupation by the soviet army taken by Ivan Schiagin (1945). Then comes the cinema and theatre world: Julian Beck of the Living Theatre portraited by Carla Cerati in 1967, or a dynamic Federico Fellini photographed in 1962 by the king of paparazzi, Tazio Secchiaroli.

Some of the masters of Italian photography which appear in "Il diaframma" are Piergiorgio Branzi ("Boy with watch" of 1956); Gianni Berengo Gardin ("Lido of Venice" 1958); Fulvio Roiter ("Umbria" 1954); Mimmo Jodice ("Views of Naples" 1980) to end with Oliviero Toscani ("Today is tomorrow" 2005).

These pictures are almost all in black and white, embellished by black frames, bought for this occasion. There are few exceptions, one of which is a wonderful still life by Christopher Broadbent (Lemonade 2000) that resembles a sixteenth century painting.