From April 21 to July 9, 2022, at Leica Galerie Milano, Via Giuseppe Mengoni 4 (corner of Piazza Duomo), an exhibition celebrates the talent of Bryan Adams, one of the most globally acclaimed rockers, who over the past two decades has built a solid reputation as a photographer that has led him to sign the 2022 edition of the Pirelli Calendar and to portray personalities such as Queen Elizabeth II of England.

The exhibition, curated by Anke Dagenhard and Denis Curti, presents twenty-eight large-format works that delve precisely into his career as a portraitist.

For the Milan appointment, Bryan Adams' shots focus on leading figures from the worlds of entertainment, music, fashion, and art, from Amy Winehouse to Ben Kingsley, Kate Moss to Mick Jagger, Pink to Lindsay Lohan, Morrissey to Michael Jackson, and many more.

Traditional studio portraits are juxtaposed with less conventional ones that testify to the highly complicit relationship Adams has managed to establish with his models-they are often longtime friends-and delve into the more intimate nature of celebrities.

In each image, the photographer's strong presence is felt; Bryan Adams' camera lens does not create a barrier between himself and the person portrayed; his great ability is precisely to overcome distance and ideally embrace the subject.

Biographical notes.

Bryan Adams (Kingston, Canada, 1959) has achieved extraordinary global musical success since the 1980s.

After a self-taught beginning, he became a professional photographer in the late 1990s, specializing in portrait and fashion photography. Easy game for him to meet stars, his colleagues. And so he has photographed actors, models, singers, and celebrities from around the world, from Mickey Rourke to Kate Moss, Amy Winehouse to Mick Jagger, Sir Ben Kingsley to Lana Del Rey, even signing a famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that ended up on a Canadian postage stamp.

Bryan Adams has published five books of photography: American Women (2004) featuring portraits of some influential American women dressed Calvin Klein, Exposed (2012), Untitled (2015), dedicated to his abstract shots.

In his photos, Adams manages to combine the aesthetic dimension with the ethical one, as evidenced by the volumes Wounded - The Legacy of War (2013) with images of young British soldiers heavily wounded and maimed during the Iraq war, and Homeless (2019) where his direct, compassionate and dignified photographs tell the story of some homeless people.

His advertising campaigns have been used by Hugo Boss, Guess Jeans, Sand, Converse, Montblanc, Omega, John Richmond, Fred Perry, Escada, Windsor, Kaldewei, Jaguar, and OPEL.

His work has also been published in British Vogue, L'uomo Vogue, American Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, British GQ, Esquire, Interview Magazine and i-D.

He is one of the founders of Berlin-based Zoo Magazine, for which he regularly publishes his photographs.