On Saturday 7 February 2026 at 5 pm, Swinging London: Unseen Photographs opens at Studio Iusgate, Via Castiglione 81, Bologna.

The second solo exhibition of Gian Butturini (1935–2006) organised by the gallery presents a selection of photographs taken by the Brescia-born photographer in London in 1969. Some of the finest images from the photobook London by Gian Butturini are shown alongside previously unseen works, exhibited here for the first time.

Part of the ART CITY Bologna 2026 programme, the exhibition will also take part in ART CITY White Night, bringing back to Bologna many photographs from Butturini’s celebrated reportage on London at the end of the 1960s.

The first edition of the photobook quickly sold out and soon became a cult publication sought after by collectors.

Butturini’s photographs portray late-1960s London from a new, unvarnished perspective. They take us through the world of Swinging London: young people, girls in miniskirts, immigrants, Black Londoners, people on the margins and inhabitants of the City. Butturini freely manipulates his images according to the message he wants to convey: he crops them, darkens them, accentuates their grain; he places the troubled face of a hippie alongside the stern expression of a City financier.

In the mid-2010s, the renowned photographer Martin Parr came across London by Gian Butturini and realised that he had discovered “an overlooked gem”. After contacting the Gian Butturini Association, he persuaded Bologna-based publisher Damiani to reissue the book in 2017, with a foreword by Parr himself.

What followed became a major controversy in the international photography world between 2019 and 2021. A young Black British woman, who had received the book as a gift from her father, interpreted the juxtaposition of two photographs very differently from Butturini’s stated intention. One depicts a young Black woman confined inside a glass booth selling Underground tickets; the other, the then-famous gorilla at London Zoo, who from behind the bars “receives with imperial dignity, on his scowling face, the jokes and peel thrown at him by his nephews in ties”, as Butturini himself writes in the book. His intention in creating the diptych was to condemn all forms of humiliation and racial or social segregation.

The young woman interpreted the juxtaposition instead as an offensive and racist equation of a Black woman with an ape. Amid the intense climate surrounding Black Lives Matter, political correctness and debates over so-called woke culture, she denounced the book on Twitter. The criticism rapidly spread across social media, triggering a fierce backlash against both Parr and Butturini, who had died in 2006. Martin Parr subsequently resigned as artistic director of the Bristol Photo Festival and asked the publisher to withdraw the book from sale and destroy the remaining copies.

The destruction of the books was prevented by the Gian Butturini Association, founded several years earlier, which took possession of the remaining copies and began an extensive programme devoted to promoting Butturini’s work and legacy through exhibitions and conferences, with the aim of restoring a fuller historical understanding of the photographer and his work.

The exhibition presents 25 works, 13 of which have never previously been shown.

Their presentation anticipates the publication of a second book devoted to Gian Butturini’s London, which will bring together a substantial selection of the most significant previously unpublished photographs.

Gian Butturini
Swinging London, the unseen works
curated by Jacopo Cenacchi

7 February, 6 pm
Talk with Marta Butturini
and Jacopo Cenacchi

7 February – 30 April 2026

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Studio Iusgate venue, Via Castiglione 81
40124 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
Monday–Friday, 9 am–1 pm and 3–6 pm
Saturday and Sunday, closed