“Michele Pellegrino is the photographer of labour, silence and clouds. He is the photographer of the mountains and their people. He has documented a peasant and mountain civilisation that no longer exists, that lived by labour, completely dependent on the seasons and changes in the weather. A silent civilisation that has disappeared in silence. When the mountains were transformed from landscape to panorama, they became not a place of work but of recreation and entertainment.” This is what Mario Calabresi writes about Michele Pellegrino, a self-taught photographer, coming from that world in which “labour is a companion of life”. At a certain point he was struck by the reading of Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini’s book Un paese. His photos tell of a human and anthropological dimension of landscape, whether it is of the mountains, the beloved hills of the Langhe or the sea, and of a true, historical, universal relationship between the existence of people and that of the landscape. They are exceptional portraits, snapshots of an almost completely lost world, respectful and noble, yet also sometimes ironic, view of humanity. And even when the human figure is not present, people, with their wonder before nature, their desires, their making, their stature are always present in the photographer’s gaze. Today, at 90 years old, Pellegrino retraces 57 years of photography in this anthology, accompanied by excerpts from the texts of his numerous books and authors such as Daniele Regis, Mario Calabresi, Walter Guadagnini, Giuliana Scimé, which, like a diary, tell of a life always travelled with that gaze.