Until 22 March 2026, the Museo delle Terre Nuove in San Giovanni Valdarno hosts the photographic exhibition Dimorare. In viaggio con Alex MacLean, dedicated to one of the leading international figures in contemporary photography.

Promoted and organised by the Municipality of San Giovanni Valdarno and Fondazione MUS.E, with the support of the Regione Toscana as part of its programme supporting museums of regional significance, the exhibition offers a journey across the world through the perspective of Alex MacLean, an American pilot and photographer who has documented landscapes and cities on every continent from an aerial viewpoint. Trained as an architect and the recipient of numerous international awards, MacLean was involved several years ago, at the time of the museum’s opening, in the creation of a remarkable series of aerial views of Tuscany’s medieval planned towns. These images still form a key feature of one of the museum’s galleries.

In dialogue with these photographs, the exhibition broadens its focus to encompass MacLean’s wider body of work. Throughout his career, he has explored the entire inhabited world: cultivated land, urban settlements, places of transit and pause become visual testimonies to humanity’s imprint on the Earth and to the natural processes that follow. Characterised by strong descriptive intensity and a refined aesthetic sensibility, the images invite reflection on our relationship with the landscape, highlighting both formal qualities and the need for a more balanced dialogue with the environment.

A significant section of the exhibition is devoted to domestic nature: spaces transformed by human activity through intensive agricultural or floricultural cultivation. Vast cultivated areas, observed from above, take on rhythmic, geometric and chromatic configurations that recall artistic composition, suspended between documentation and poetry.

Alongside these works are views of spaces associated with movement and stopping — car parks, motorway interchanges, ports — everyday places that, through the photographer’s eye, are transformed into rigorous geometric compositions, revealing unexpected visual qualities.

The exhibition continues with an exploration of forms of dwelling. MacLean’s photographs place towns and cities in relation to their geographical context, emphasising volumes, patterns and proportions within urban structures. From the settlements of Mystic Island in New Jersey, affected by rising sea levels, to neighbourhoods in Las Vegas, the desert landscapes of Arizona and European outskirts, shared questions emerge about how communities organise themselves and express identity in space.

This reflection on urban geometries finds a natural dialogue with the ideal planning principles of the Florentine Terre Nuove — newly founded towns of the medieval period — of which San Giovanni Valdarno is a particularly emblematic example.