Bruce Gilden's 'A Closer Look' at Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia

Bruce Gilden's photographs are unsettling, and his portrait of a woman is no exception, carrying something bothersome, irritating and embarrassing. Visitors to Gilden's exhibition A Closer Look — literally "a closer look" — at the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia, held between March and August of this year and curated by Denis Curti with a Skira catalogue, will certainly have asked why the faces of these people are photographed in this way, and why these particular people. Anyone familiar with the career of this eighty-year-old American photographer, a pure visual autodidact and for a period a member of Magnum, understands it could only be so, since his favourite motto, reiterated in his interview with Denis Curti in the catalogue, is the celebrated phrase of Robert Capa: "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough." The piece appears in Occhio Rotondo 73, the column by Marco Belpoliti and Anita Romanello published on 4 October 2026.