Mario Magajna: Photographer

“Every time I take a photograph, I know it will go down in history. It is a bigger act than writing an article. This is something much more alive and better able to engage people.” This quote is from an interview with Mario Magajna in the Primorske novice newspaper in May 1983, when the Slovene Association of Journalists had awarded him the Tomšič Prize for his achievements in the field of photojournalism. Magajna was awarded a number of major honours for his work, including the Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and the Order of Freedom of the Republic of Slovenia.

The photojournalist Mario Magajna (Maganja) was born in 1916 in Križ (Trieste), where he spent his childhood. He was a self-taught photographer with enormous natural talent. His private and professional life can be divided into three periods of non-formal learning. He acquired his first Kodak camera at the age of 14 and photographed extensively with it, developing a passion for photography and thereby laying the foundations for his future career. The second period – probably the most important of his whole career – began when he started working at the Foto-Radiottica shop in Trieste. The third period covers the experience he gained as a photojournalist working for the Primorski dnevnik newspaper. His photographic oeuvre, comprising approximately 260,000 images, is preserved in the Slovene National and Study Library in Trieste.

Entirely dedicated to his photographic vocation, Magajna never saw himself as an artist, always as a photographer: both a witness to his own time and place and an active participant in them. Despite his lack of formal training, he constantly strove to improve his work, creating ever-better photographs. His quest for both aesthetic perfection and compositional excellence can be clearly seen in his works.

From the end of World War Two right up to his retirement, Magajna exhibited a clear preference for contemporary subjects. Yet, despite having been created over the course of fifty years, largely as photographic commentaries for the Primorski dnevnik newspaper, the messages conveyed by his photographs remain highly relevant today. Magajna’s photographs bear witness to his search for an expressive language of his own. The photographic medium enabled him to establish trusting, empathetic contact with people, and this, in turn, enabled him to get to know them better and present them in a more original way. It is this that gives Magajna’s photographs their special charm and lyrical quality.

This exhibition focuses on a selection of Magajna’s works that most clearly reveal his main motivations: his unconditional commitment to photography as a vocation and his deep desire to immortalise everything happening in Trieste and its surrounding area. Yet despite these basic preoccupations, over the years he developed a unique photographic language, artfully combining narrative (pieces of news, events, stories) and testimony (a kindly, if naïve, form of poetry, both simple and direct).

The creators of this exhibition have been both guided and inspired by Magajna’s own words: “I was just a photojournalist. As a Slovene, I did what I could for my people.” The photographs displayed here seek to bring the world of Magajna and his everyday heroes closer to the viewer. With his photographs, Magajna created a history of people who, despite living in an era of extreme political uncertainty, possessed the optimism and determination that allowed them to persistently assert their presence in their corner of the world.

—Robi Jakomin, Andrej Furlan

In 2016 a number of Slovene institutions active in Italy (the Bubnič Magajna Cultural Society, the Slovene Club, the Slovene National Library of Studies, and the Slovene Cultural-Economic Association) joined together to organise a major exhibition of Magajna’s photographs in Trieste to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. Unusually for a Slovene-themed event in the city, this exhibition was funded by the Autonomous Region of Friuli-Venezia Gulia as well as the Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Slovenians Abroad, and the venue was provided by the Municipality of Trieste. This support was highly significant, as it showed that it was not just Slovenes resident in Trieste who felt a connection to Mario and wanted to pay tribute to him, but the city as a whole.