For the man who founded Éditions Contrejour in 1975—opening up the creative space of the book to an entire generation of artists—it is also an essential passage. “What interests me is not photography itself, but everything I can put into it: my memories, my loves, the films that moved me, the spaghetti I twirled around my fork, the music and songs that made me more handsome than I really am, the writings that changed the colour of the sea, and even the stories I invent to keep myself alive.”

The exhibition brings together a previously unseen selection of photographs taken by Claude Nori between the 1970s and the 1990s, from the beaches of the Adriatic to the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, via the Po Valley, the Basque coast and Sicily. Running through the exhibition is the resolutely modern, humorous and sparkling vision of a photographic artist—a visionary of tenderness disguised as a dilettante.

Fifteen years after the major tribute devoted to him by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, La Dolce Vista is the first major retrospective of his work to be held in a gallery. The black-and-white prints in La Dolce Vista are produced using traditional processes, exposed in the darkroom and printed on gelatin silver paper. Many of the prints also come from Claude Nori’s personal archives and are being brought to light for the first time.