Jessica Lange – Musei Reali di Torino, Italy

Special opening Wednesday 7 October 10.00-19.00

From 7 October 2026 to 7 February 2027, the Chiablese Rooms of the Royal Museums of Turin will host the exhibition STILL IMAGE. Photographs by Jessica Lange , curated by Anne Morin.

Produced by Ares in collaboration with the Royal Museums of Turin , the exhibition presents the photographic works of the American actress and photographer Jessica Lange (Cloquet, Minnesota, United States, 20 April 1949) and brings to Italy for the first time a collection of largely unpublished works.

The exhibition, through a selection of over 200 images , retraces almost thirty years of photographic research, conveying the author’s intense, poetic and profoundly human gaze.

The exhibition unfolds through eight thematic sections , many of which have never been published before, focusing in particular on photographs taken since the late 1990s, in which artistic sensitivity and documentary attention reveal a profound and melancholic gaze on the contemporary world.

The heart of the exhibition is the series dedicated to Highway 61 , the famous road that crosses the United States from north to south, from Minnesota, the artist’s homeland, to New Orleans. In these black-and-white images, characterized by a pronounced grain and strong contrasts, Lange constructs a narrative of rural America made of silences, suspended atmospheres, and details charged with meaning.

Alongside this core are other series that expand the author’s geography and imagination, such as the photographs found in the Mexico section , particularly those taken during the Feast of the Dead in San Miguel de Allende. Here, Jessica Lange moves without a precise objective, guided by intuition and experience of the world. Her gaze favors solitude, distance from others, and a discreet, almost invisible presence that observes and contemplates rather than intervenes. Time, in her photographs, is not interrupted but dilated: it slowly unfolds, following the light, the pace, the wait. It is especially at dusk and at night that Mexico takes shape: shadows, bodies, dances, folk music, encounters, and gestures come alive in an intense and sensual dimension.

We then move on to the urban shots of Dérive , taken in New York during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020-2021) and the series Freak Show , born during the filming of American Horror Story, in which an interest in the world of the circus and its eccentric and marginal figures emerges.

Among the completely new sections, “Gestures” brings together an inventory of gestures and bodily expressions, minimal yet significant, capable of suggesting, in themselves, the beginning of a story. At the poetic heart of the series is the extraordinary communicative power of the hand, an element that clearly harks back to Jessica Lange’s acting career and seems to have profoundly inspired her gaze.

Landscapes is composed of images, created through photogravure, of abandoned landscapes in the American South, whose silent desolation conveys an atmosphere, like a state of mind, a psychological and aesthetic texture capable of linking to the American landscape tradition, in particular to the work of Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz.

Similarly, Presences of the Past brings together photographs that Lange has dedicated to places marked by great human or natural catastrophes, the traces of which remain, suspended in space, like invisible presences of the past that still hover among the remains of the tragedy.

The journey concludes with Mondo , a collection of photographs from Russia to California, from Scandinavia to Italy: images that document times and places, in which Jessica Lange simply photographs “what she sees,” with a poetic gaze on the everyday. Her classic and deliberate language combines composition, anticipation, and sensitivity, resulting in images with a cinematic and timeless quality.

During the photography exhibition, the Royal Museums of Turin are planning specialist visits, educational activities, and workshops: the calendar will be published soon on the official website museireali.it .

On the occasion of the exhibition, the Fondazione Circolo dei lettori has curated a series of meetings entitled “Along Highway 61 ,” organized with the Musei Reali of Turin to explore the landscape and identity of the United States through photography, music, history, and literature. At the center are the memory of rural America, the myth of the American Dream , musical tradition, and the literary Mississippi.

The program of collateral events continues with the collaboration of the National Cinema Museum , which is offering a screening of the film “ The Postman Always Rings Twice ” ( USA, 1981), directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson. The film will be screened at the Cinema Massimo in Turin (Hall 3) on Tuesday, December 15th at 8:30 pm, with a repeat screening on Wednesday, December 16th at 6:00 pm. For information and to purchase tickets, please contact the box office or visit the Cinema Massimo website.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (Italian/English) published by Moebius .

BIOGRAPHY Jessica Lange

Born and raised in Cloquet, Minnesota, acclaimed and award-winning actress Jessica Lange studied photography at the University of Minnesota on a scholarship, which she later turned down to pursue acting. While living in Paris in the 1970s, Lange befriended photographers Robert Frank and Danny Lyon, who helped her develop and refine her technique. In the early 1990s, Lange rediscovered her passion for photography when she received a Leica camera as a gift. She has been taking pictures ever since.

Her photographs have been exhibited at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 2009; the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow in 2014; the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona in 2015; and the Centro Cultural de Cascais, Portugal, in 2015, among others. She was the first recipient of the George Eastman House Honors Award in 2009. Her publications include her first monograph, 50 Photographs (powerHouse Books, 2008), In Mexico (RM, 2010), Highway 61 (powerHouse Books, 2019), Dérive (powerHouse Books, 2022), and the children’s book It’s About A Little Bird (sourcebooks, 2013).

” Public-private collaboration ,” says  Alfonsina Russo, Head of the Ministry of Culture’s Department for the Promotion of Cultural Heritage , ” represents an important lever for enhancing cultural heritage and creating new opportunities for its enjoyment. The exhibition dedicated to Jessica Lange’s photography at the Royal Museums of Turin is a significant example: a project that combines the richness of historical collections with a contemporary perspective, capable of engaging diverse audiences and creating new opportunities for encounters with art .”

” We are particularly pleased to welcome Jessica Lange’s photographic work to Italy for the first time ,” says  Paola D’Agostino, Director General of the Royal Museums of Turin . ” This intimate and personal exploration, cultivated for over thirty years away from the spotlight, is a journey through time, both geographical and existential, encompassing places, memories, and contemplation. This exhibition invites the public to reflect on the value of the gaze and presence, establishing a dialogue between contemporary photography and the memory preserved in the collections of the Royal Museums .” 

 “Jessica Lange’s photographs ,” emphasizes Anne Morin, curator of the exhibition and director of diChroma photography , ” aren’t so much intended to explain or narrate in a linear fashion, as to make visible the movement of life, its matter, its rhythm, and its musicality. The images appear as fragments and whispers, moments that compose a suspended narrative, also made of silences and what remains unsaid.”

 “It is a privilege for us to inaugurate Still Image ,” concludes Edoardo Accattino, CEO of Ares Srl , ” a project that reveals an intimate and deeply personal dimension of Jessica Lange’s artistic research. Her photographs traverse places, memories, and landscapes, transforming reality into a suspension of time. With this exhibition, we wanted to highlight an authentic and discreet gaze, capable of restoring photography to extraordinary evocative power. I would like to thank the General Director, Paola D’Agostino, and the entire staff of the Royal Museums of Turin for their invaluable collaboration, and Anne Morin, who has believed in this project for years and has passionately contributed to its realization.”

Special openings
Wednesday 7 October 10.00-19.00
1 November 10.00-19.00
8 December 10.00-19.00
24 December 10.00-17.00
25 December closed
26 December: 10.00-19.00
30 December 10.00-19.00
31 December 10.00-17.00
1 January 12.00-19.00
6 January 10.00-19.00

Tickets
Combined rate  Exhibition + Royal Museums of Turin: €24
Full price: €16
Reduced price: €13  children between 18 and 25 years old, teachers, journalists, people with disabilities, card holders (Feltrinelli, Mondadori, Arci, Aiace, Coop, Fiaf, Touring card), groups of at least 10 people
Children: €10 children between 12 and 17 years old
Schools: €6
Free for holders of the Piedmont Valle d’Aosta Museum Pass, Turin Tourism card, children from 0 to 12 years old

Information:

Ares Turin
arestorino.it  – jessicalange@arestorino.it