Carlo Orsi Archive

The photographer Carlo Orsi (1941-2021) with his Leica traversed the world as a witness for five decades: a pupil of Ugo Mulas, he established himself as a great fashion photographer and photoeditor of international magazines, without however ever losing his profound connection with hometown, Milan, which tells through images in all its aspects: from fashion, to design and the skyline, leaving a legacy of a huge archive of shots, strictly in black and white.

Ongoing work
The photographic archive
The Carlo Orsi Archive was created as a space of resistance to forgetting. It is a living organism, committed to protecting and cataloguing an extraordinary heritage of around 120,000 original negatives, evidence of the second half of the 20th century filtered through the sensitive and uncompromising gaze of a photographer who has traversed art, fashion, architecture, design, theatre and news with the same urgency for precision and truth.
But the archive does not limit itself to preservation. It documents and disseminates. It makes accessible a photographic work that is, to all intents and purposes, a historical source: a visual atlas in black and white, not bent to the logic of the market but driven by the desire to make photography a cognitive and civil practice. In this, its vocation is more museum than commercial, more public than private.
Yet, like any project that springs from an artistic biography, the Archive also defines itself through its relationship with the community. It is a device open to human connection, ready to collect stories, testimonies, memories, anecdotes from those who have worked with Orsi, shared journeys, passed through ateliers and editorial offices. An affective and cultural network that expands the work and draws a relational geography.
A site in progress
Visiting the Online Archive one enters an environment that is not content with displaying photographs, but transforms them into narratives. Each shot is a tale: the face of an artist, the construction of a building, a historical moment or an unrepeatable gesture. It is not a website, but a threshold, a gateway that leads into a cultured, experimental, international Milan and from there, out into the world.
The site's strength lies in its intimate and narrative atmosphere, in its visual and cultural richness, in its ability to hold together continuity and surprise. From iconic portraits to reportages in distant lands, each section is a map, each image a piece of a coherent and evolving mosaic.
It is an archive that has not finished telling us who we are, that continues to give us back, with rigour and poetry, a collective visual memory, capable of touching the present with the same simplicity with which it has traversed the past.

Carlo Orsi Archive


The photographer Carlo Orsi (1941-2021) with his Leica traversed the world as a witness for five decades: a pupil of Ugo Mulas, he established himself as a great fashion photographer and photoeditor of international magazines, without however ever losing his profound connection with hometown, Milan, which tells through images in all its aspects: from fashion, to design and the skyline, leaving a legacy of a huge archive of shots, strictly in black and white.

Ongoing work
The photographic archive
The Carlo Orsi Archive was created as a space of resistance to forgetting. It is a living organism, committed to protecting and cataloguing an extraordinary heritage of around 120,000 original negatives, evidence of the second half of the 20th century filtered through the sensitive and uncompromising gaze of a photographer who has traversed art, fashion, architecture, design, theatre and news with the same urgency for precision and truth.
But the archive does not limit itself to preservation. It documents and disseminates. It makes accessible a photographic work that is, to all intents and purposes, a historical source: a visual atlas in black and white, not bent to the logic of the market but driven by the desire to make photography a cognitive and civil practice. In this, its vocation is more museum than commercial, more public than private.
Yet, like any project that springs from an artistic biography, the Archive also defines itself through its relationship with the community. It is a device open to human connection, ready to collect stories, testimonies, memories, anecdotes from those who have worked with Orsi, shared journeys, passed through ateliers and editorial offices. An affective and cultural network that expands the work and draws a relational geography.
A site in progress
Visiting the Online Archive one enters an environment that is not content with displaying photographs, but transforms them into narratives. Each shot is a tale: the face of an artist, the construction of a building, a historical moment or an unrepeatable gesture. It is not a website, but a threshold, a gateway that leads into a cultured, experimental, international Milan and from there, out into the world.
The site's strength lies in its intimate and narrative atmosphere, in its visual and cultural richness, in its ability to hold together continuity and surprise. From iconic portraits to reportages in distant lands, each section is a map, each image a piece of a coherent and evolving mosaic.
It is an archive that has not finished telling us who we are, that continues to give us back, with rigour and poetry, a collective visual memory, capable of touching the present with the same simplicity with which it has traversed the past.

L'archivio di Carlo Orsi vanta una straordinaria collezione di negativi in bianco e nero e un'innumerevole quantità di stampe, tutte magistralmente realizzate dallo stesso fotografo in camera oscura. Questo prezioso materiale, interamente analogico, è conservato con estrema cura dalla dedita curatrice dell'archivio.

Carlo Orsi, un film di Simona Confalonieri

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