Curated by Ono Arte Contemporanea
The opening of the exhibition is by invitation only.
The scheduled talk with the photographer, at 7:00 pm, can be booked via this webform.
The exhibition will be open from June 17 to July 6, 2025 during the opening hours of the MArTA with the purchase of the museum entrance ticket. All the information here.
The exhibition tells, through the memories of the British photographer Charles Moriarty and the approximately 50 images carefully selected from his archive, a fundamental part of the professional and human experience of one of the most beloved artists of the last decades: Amy Winehouse.
We are at the beginning of the new millennium and Amy Winehouse is preparing to become an icon, a global star thanks to a powerful voice and her lyrics, often painfully honest. The work done by Charles Moriarty is a sort of antidote to the destructive narrative of the press, especially the British one. Because it is right to remember that before Amy Winehouse there was Amy: a Jewish girl from North London, born in Southgate and raised in Camden. A girl who, like many in those golden years, just wanted to sing.
Charles Moriarty’s shots were taken in London and New York, in what was a crucial period in Amy Winehouse’s life, including her professional life. A period that Charles affectionately calls “Before Frank”. Charles, in those unique photographs, was able to tell the story of the girl before she became an icon. In some shots we can see her fun side, her youth, but there are moments when suddenly we see Amy Winehouse already a star. And the girl from a few frames earlier no longer exists. Charles and Amy had just one day in both cities, London and New York, for those shoots. The visual story of that period is extremely personal. Amy is true to herself and all the images are honest and revealing of her transition from little more than a teenager, with a dream in the drawer, to a praised professional of the music industry. Amy, in fact, was nineteen when Charles Moriarty, himself just twenty-one, created the two photo shoots from which the image on the cover of the singer’s debut album, “Frank”, was extracted. Charles immortalized her near Spitalfields, in London. On that occasion they met a man who was walking his Scottish Terriers. Amy and Charles are full of energy, spontaneity and ambition. As Moriarty has often recalled: “I hope that those who look at them can see my friend.”
What Charles and Amy produced in those two sessions in 2003, with so much uncertainty and inexperience, is in fact Amy Winehouse who is about to reach the peak of her career, made up of highs – which have made her eternal – and lows that would have killed her. It is in fact complicated to identify a precise emotion that can be evoked in those who look at these photos. Happiness, sadness, nostalgia or pain. The uncertainty is perhaps due to the fact that we can find, in this album of memories, all the elements that characterize the Amy Winehouse world icon: the Cleopatra eyeliner cut, the iconic hairstyle, the unmistakably early 00s clothes. They are apparently natural elements that seem to have always been part of Amy and yet, as Charles reveals, it is likely that it isHe was the first to have fixed, on photographic film, those elements so unique, characterizing and deeply linked to that extraordinary personality. A sort of premonition of the Amy Winehouse that we would have known in the years to come.
Charles Moriarty has said many times that he would have liked the world to have been able to know the Amy that he knew, and many people, who were close to Amy in her short and extraordinary life, have admitted to having seen and known the real Amy Winehouse only when they were able to browse through Charles Moriarty’s album of memories. The exhibition consists of 50 photographs that Moriarty took of Amy, and another 10 between nude portraits and still lifes, specially selected from the photographer’s vast archive so that they enter into dialogue with the permanent exhibition of the MArTA.