Portrait of an era: Photographs of Eugenio Goglio (1865-1926)

Between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, the Valle Brembana, in the province of Bergamo, goes through a time of silent transformations: new industrial initiatives accelerate economic development, landscapes change, social roles are redefined. To recount that passage are not only written documents, but the faces, looks and gestures fixed by photography.   
From this visual memory comes Ritratto di un'Epoca. Photographs by Eugenio Goglio (1865-1926), an exhibition promoted and organized by the City of Bergamo and the Bergamo Museum of Histories open to the public from April 11, 2026 to July 19, 2026 at the Sestini Museum of Photography, at the Convent of San Francesco in Bergamo. 
The exhibition is supported by SIAD Fondazione Sestini with the contribution of the Province of Bergamo and with the Consorzio del Bacino Imbrifero Montano del Lago di Como e Fiumi Brembo e Serio.
The protagonist of the exhibition, curated by Roberta Frigeni, Nicholas Fiorina and Daniela Pacchiana of the Bergamo Museum of Histories, is Eugenio Goglio (1865-1926), a multifaceted figure of the Brembana Valley, on the centenary of his death. 
Eugenio Goglio, born in Piazza Brembana and educated in Milan between the Brera Academy and the Superior School of Applied Art for Industries, returned to the valley in 1889 where, alongside his artistic activity, he became "the" photographer of the area. His distinctive feature would be the portrait: single, couple, group, in studio or outdoors, always with attention to the smallest detail, like a set. The portrait thus becomes not only an artistic expression, but also an instrument of anthropological and social investigation, at a time when the natural geography of the valley recorded the first signs of twentieth-century anthropization. 
The exhibition takes shape precisely from this photographic production. More than 140 shots in black and white tell the story of the Brembana Valley in its landscapes, its faces and its changes, restoring the richness of a territory observed through the attentive gaze of the "Genius" of the valley. What emerges is a choral portrait of the community in the years of the Belle Époque, when the isolation of the Upper Valley was gradually overcome by the arrival of the railroad and the local economy experienced the first signs of industrialization linked to the exploitation of water from the Brembo River.