THE PATHS OF THE SACRED
Gestures and Rituals of Faith in Contemporary Photography

Mario Giacomelli, Lourdes, 1957
© Archivio Mario Giacomelli, Senigallia

Curated by Micol Forti, Director of the Contemporary Art Collection of the Vatican Museums and Alessandra Mauro, Editorial Director of Contrasto
In collaboration with Livia Ficoroni

In the year of the Jubilee of Hope 2025, this exhibition brings together the work of some of the world’s greatest photographers: from Gianni Berengo Gardin to Antonio Biasucci, from Giorgia Fiorio to Mimmo Jodice, Mario Giacomelli, Ferdinando Scianna, and international artists such as Sebastião Salgado, Markéta Luskačová, and Harun Farocki.
To undertake a pilgrimage means leaving one’s home and beginning a journey toward another land—a destination that represents a goal, a conquest, and a place of arrival. A place that does not belong to a single person but to all, made not only of solid walls but of faith and hope, of values and concreteness, of trust and a sense of belonging.
Narrating the experience of the sacred is one of the greatest challenges that master photographers have never shied away from. Gestures and gazes, objects and rituals, dances and prayers, processions and encounters—all contain and safeguard the everyday sense of spirituality, the mysterious concreteness of faith, captured in photographic images suspended between presence and absence, between what is seen and what remains invisible.
Photography has often observed the many facets of these journeys shaped by spirituality and devotion, by the relationship with the land and the surrounding space, exploring the mystical meaning enclosed in a physical and religious experience—profound and total, archaic and ancestral—deeply rooted in history and memory.
At the same time, the photographers’ gaze has managed to capture, through anthropological, visionary, or poetic approaches, the emotion and effort, the hope and courage found in the intimate and daily relationship with the sacred—its places and its witnesses.