Journalist and writer Lina Sotis guides us on the discovery of Ugo Mulas’ time and his photography. In anticipation of the exhibition curated by Denis Curti and Alberto Salvadori that will land at the Palazzo Reale in Milan on October 10, 2024. Over two hundred and fifty images retrace his career and the bond with Milan, the focus of the "Ugo Mulas in città" initiative, which involves the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Museo del Novecento, the Museo Poldi Pezzoli and the Marconi Foundation

I remember Ugo as a handsome, gloomy man, whom you would have liked to have looked at you. Those were different times, men still looked. And in Milan, but clearly also in the other capitals of the world, Ugo was considered the man who looked most deeply, most masterfully, most darkly. He showed others, with his photographs, the things that were there but could not be seen: Ugo Mulas was the most famous photographer of those years. But he didn’t look famous, he didn’t put on airs at all. He was a man of few words, but that was also his charm. He had a beautiful wife, Nini. He brought her out every once in a while, not always. He had a sister who followed in his footsteps, Maria. And she followed him with imaginative deference, as if Mulas couldn’t help but be a symbol, the symbolic name of photography.
In fact, in an era in which photographers were fashionable ‒ now it’s no longer like that: there are no geniuses anymore, there are simply lots of amateurs who take pictures everywhere and in any case with their cell phones, and almost always for their own selfishness ‒, back then photographers were super. Back then it was Helmut Newton, Giovanni Gastel, Oliviero Toscani, but Ugo was different from everyone else, because he didn’t do fashion, he didn’t do frivolous things, he didn’t do catchy things, he didn’t do advertising things. Ugo only did culture, seriousness, intellect.
The photograph in the catalogue that struck me the most and reminded me of those times, because ultimately it’s a symbol, is a photograph of Lucio Fontana while he was doing his famous cut. Here’s the pair, it was perfect. He, photographing Lucio’s cut, photographed what could be behind that cut, everything you can imagine. He photographed possibility and the other gave possibility, to those who looked at him, to imagine what he wanted. There, that was Ugo Mulas. Imagine the best seeing sludge, imagine the incredible seeing a sulky face, imagine an era seeing a lively and popular neighbourhood like Brera from the tables of his famous Jamaica, the bar Ugo loved back then. There are lots of photographs of Ugo at Jamaica, he captures the tables, he captures mamma Lina, he captures little Michela, he captures the angry faces of the time, he captures their clothes, back then it was fashionable to be poor, for goodness sake not to be ostentatiously rich, for goodness sake not ostentatiously fashionable, for goodness sake different from the middle class, even if everyone would have denied their birth a little, whether upper or lower middle class.
Then Ugo got sick, he got sick with a difficult disease, a disease that he treated in a hospital in New York. I went to visit him with some other friends and he came towards us with an IV pole and for the first time he smiled, he smiled in a friendly way, he didn’t smile in a gloomy way, he smiled at what he had always underestimated, what he didn’t look for in his photographs ‒ there he looked for the truth, the shadow, the spite, the contempt ‒, he smiled like a tender man, a man who wants to be normal, a man who is happy with the affection of his friends. Milan loved him. We miss you a lot, Ugo, a lot, but with you your era has also gone. With you, men like you have also gone, the ones everyone loved to death.

Lina Sotis

BIO
Lina Sotis, from Rome, came to Milan, the wife of a the Milanese Gian Marco Moratti. At the age of twenty-three, she does not cease to be Nerazzurra, but she ceases to be Moratti and becomes Sotis again. She starts working, first at Vogue in advertising, then at Amica, then at Corinf, the evening paper, and then at Corriere della Sera, where she becomes the first woman in the news section. She had a long career, lasting forty-one years, at Corriere della Sera. She still works there today.

INFO
10 October 2024 – 2 February 2025
Ugo Mulas. L’operazione fotografica
PALAZZO REALE
Piazza del Duomo 12, Milan
https://www.palazzorealemilano.it/