'60. Gli anni giovani. Musica, consumi, stili di vita

The idea for this publication, which is part of the travelling exhibition organised by the Lombardy Coop, was captivating and quite simple: to celebrate the forty-year anniversary of the Beatles concerts held in Italy in 1965 through a rich photographic work vividly capturing moments and people, in particular one day in Milan. The more we looked at those photographs - the faces and clothing, the objects and the people - the more we realised how the concerts reflected the spirit of an age, a "day in the life" of last century having all the elements of the social and cultural transformation generated by the 1960s. This realisation led to a desire to extend the research and capture other aspects of those changes - at the time in their infancy - that were to significantly mark the development of our society, customs and very way of thinking ... The photographs that form part of this publication are almost all from newspapers and magazines that covered the concerts.
This choice was intentional based on the type and style of work we had in mind. We are not specialists nor did we aim to be exhaustive in the field. The force of the work lies in having captured - through the images - moments and fragments which go beyond nostalgia and "I was there too" to stimulate reflection, also through comparison, on those years. We called those years "young" in the title, "young" because the generation called on to build a world from the ruins of conflict was young. "Young" because consumer goods, life styles, expectations and hopes for the future were all entirely new. The "young" were, up to that time, an unknown social category. Beginning with music and then with politics, they were to define the new coordinates for ways of being and thinking.
The youth of that time are today the ruling class and army of adult consumers in the globalised world; they are the subjects, active and passive, of the process of production, transformation and consumption of goods.
A review of those years is not unproductive if we reflect on the hopes and expectations of these young people and the extraordinary amount of change they saw and participated in. In fact, an exploration of that time almost becomes imperative. This is because what we are today can be reconsidered, visually also, in the light of the positive values and also the glaring errors generated by that tumultuous time, a period which was to have repercussions in all fields over the next forty years... ... From these photographs of a distant time (which to some degree continues in an egalitarian and progressive spirit) we hope viewers and readers gain similar ideas and thoughts: a way of thinking that at the time changed the world for the better, notwithstanding the many contradictions.
It is not by accident that today we feel the need to revitalise our society - which has become so secularised - with new ideas that go beyond ideologies. If not the ideas, then certainly the spirit of the 1960s can help give shape to change, can be cause for self-reflection in a critical way, while at the same time keeping sight of individual freedoms shared with others. And then we might discover, with perhaps a sigh of relief, that those young years never aged, despite everything.