All Our Yesterdays @ Pisa, Museum of Graphics, Palazzo Lanfranchi

Opening event was held on 11th April 2014, with international guests

Posted on: 4 April 2014

photo by Fabrizio Sbrana

All Our Yesterdays, the great multimedia and photographic exhibition about early photography, finally opened in the Palazzo Lanfranchi Museum of Graphics, in Pisa, on Friday 11^th April, with a very crowded vernissage event.

Guests of the opening ceremony: the Major of Pisa and the Chancellor of Culture, representatives from the University of Pisa and the Museum of Graphics, together with the project’s partners coming from all over Europe to celebrate this exceptional event.

The program of the day begun early afternoon with the plenary meeting of the Europeana Photography project, devoted to digitize about 430.000 photographs with historical, artistic and cultural value belonging to the first 100 years of photography. The project, which includes many important archives, agencies and photo-museums, is co-funded by the European Union and in its latest review about the project’s progress and quality it was evaluated by the experts of the European Commission as “excellent”.

Photo by Rudy Pessina

Among the initiatives of the project, All Our Yesterdays is the occasion to see how life was in Europe in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The new born medium of photography framed faces and life in a period of great change, where horses and agriculture made way to, the machines and industrialization, where work and life where harder than nowadays and where no videogames and TV could entertained in the free-time. A period where there was war but also technological and societal progress; and although everyday life was different from how we know it, joy and sorrow, stories and dreams turn out to have been strikingly similar to ours.

from left, Pietro Masi (curator of the Exhibition and General Manager of Promoter srl), Dott. Antonella Fresa (Director of Promoter srl), Dott. Marco Filippeschi (Major of Pisa) and Dott. Dario Danti (Councillor for Culture and Chairman of the Museo della Grafica) – (photo by Federico Parenti)

The vernissage started at 6 pm with speeches by the local authorities, the project’s coordinators and the representative of Europeana, the great European digital library, which the project is so much linked to. The cocktail party and opening visit of the exhibition then followed.

The timeline – Photo by Rudy Pessina

All Our Yesterdays was free entrance and was open until 2nd June; every Thursday and Sunday a digitization desk is available for digitizing the family pictures brought by the visitors (digitization service for free).