With Franco Pinna. Sardinia in color. Recovered photographs 1953–67, MAN continues the reflection on photographic language and its relationship with Sardinia, a territory of inspiration and experimentation for generations of artists. The exhibition, which celebrates the centenary of the birth of the photographer from La Maddalena (La Maddalena 1925 – Rome 1978), a master of Italian photography of the twentieth century, brings to light a long-forgotten body of work, revealing a new and surprising dimension of his gaze: that of color. In dialogue with the museum's recent research on authors and visions of the Sardinian landscape, the exhibition expands our perception of a photographer whom many have only known through black and white.

The exhibition path, composed of about eighty works including color photographic prints — largely rarely exhibited — and archival materials, offers a journey through Pinna's visual and professional history, providing new elements for critical evaluation of his work. The selected images, the result of a long process of recovery and digital restoration of the original colors, are accompanied by comparative photographs of the same subject in black and white, as well as slides and work tools from the Franco Pinna Archive, testifying to the complexity of his documentary approach. A selection of period publications, including "Vie Nuove," "Noi Donne," "L’Espresso," and "Panorama," explains the reason for his commitment to color, intended for the magazines of the time and their glossy pages, which required a sense of contemporaneity rather than the typical historicization of classic black and white.

The exhibition starts from Orgosolo 1953, the first color photographic campaign carried out by Pinna in Sardinia, and then goes through the most significant stages of his island production: Canne al vento (1958), Argia in Tonara (1960) images for the famous volume Sardegna. A civilization of stone (1961), up to the chronicles on banditry and the protests of the shepherds in 1967. The sequences, arranged like a long-lasting story, show the evolution of a language that finds in color an autonomous and poetic dimension, capable of capturing the living material of ancient and very modern Sardinia together.