The Photographer Who Looked Past the Idea of Italy

The Italian photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin, who died in August at age ninety-four, announced his vocation to the world by pissing on his lens. It was the early nineteen-fifties, and he hadn’t yet left his day job in his family’s glass shop near Saint Mark’s Square, in Venice. He was on an outing with the local photography club La Gondola when drops began to fall, and his companions rushed to cover their valuable equipment. To prove to them that he was no longer an amateur, and probably to prove something a bit more complicated to himself, Gardin decided to expose his camera to more than just the rain. “With a sophomoric gesture I urinated on an expensive Leica Telyt 200/4 lens mounted on a Visoflex,” he recalled in his autobiography, “In Parole Povere” (“Simply Put”). It’s a shame no o