Mario Giacomelli

Giacomelli was a self-taught photographer. At 13, he left high school, began working as a typesetter and spent his weekends painting. After the horrors of World War II, he turned to the more immediate medium of photography. He wandered the streets and fields of post-war Italy, inspired by the gritty Neo-Realist films of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, and influenced by the renewed Italian photographer Giuseppe Cavalli, and developed a style characterized by bold, stylized compositions and stark contrasts.

With the death of Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000) Europe lost one of its most talented photographers. Trained initially as a typographer, his early interest in graphic effect became a key part of his later photographic work. Winner of numerous medals and prizes, he acheived international status through numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, America and Japan. His highly personal, artistically atmospheric visual style demonstrates a life-long preoccupation with landscapes that emphasize linear, abstact patterns, rural townscapes, streetscenes and portraits of everyday Italian life. His work displays a profound understanding of the country and its people and a mastery of form and effect that make his photographs imaginatve works in their own right

Alex Majoli

At the age of 15, Alex Majoli joined the F45 Studio in Ravenna, working alongside Daniele Casadio. While studying at the Art Institute in Ravenna, he joined Grazia Neri Agency and traveled to Yugoslavia to document the conflict. He returned many times over the next few years, covering all major events in Kosovo and Albania.

Majoli graduated from art school in 1991. Three years later, he made an intimate portrayal of the closing of an asylum for the insane on the island of Leros, Greece, a project that became the subject of his first book, Leros.

In 1995 Majoli went to South America for several months, photographing a variety of subjects for his ongoing personal project, Requiem in Samba. He started the project Hotel Marinum in 1998, on life in harbour cities around the world, the final goal of which was to perform a theatrical multimedia show. That same year he began making a series of short films and documentaries.

After becoming a full member of Magnum Photos in 2001, Majoli covered the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and two years later the invasion of Iraq. He continues to document various conflicts worldwide for Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Granta and National Geographic.

Majoli, in collaboration with Thomas Dworzak, Paolo Pellegrin, and Ilkka Uimonen, had an extremely successful exhibition and installation Off Broadway in New York in 2004, which travelled to France and Germany. He then became involved in a project for the French Ministry of Culture entitled BPS, or Bio-Position System, about the social transformation of the city of Marseilles. His project, Libera Me, is a reflection on the human condition

Arritmia, Fabrizio Quagliuso

There is such a thing as an irregular rhythm syndrome, where the heartbeat is inconsistent; it races, slows down or flutters. There are times when the heart skips a beat, others when it frantically chases the following one to the point of breathlessness, swarming, oscillating. Somewhere between a hollowness and a fullness, the needle of our internal compass is marking out a route of truth and justice, away from the illusions of the ego and drawing us towards our instinctive selves, towards the human nature that dwells in the nature of this world and the world of nature that dwells within the human.
Mia makes this journey in reverse, from the outside moving inwards, in an ascending motion that brings the unconscious to the surface. With every step she takes, with every skipped or hastily recovered heartbeat, she seems to walk along footpaths inside a dream. And then, the mist dividing imagination and reality clears, becoming penetrable like butter meeting a blade, nullifying boundaries and distances, allowing the experience of the Whole and the One.
Mia. In Italian “mine”, belonging to me. Because when one belongs to her own, it is herself that she wants to return to

Mario De Biasi

 

Deported in Germany, Mario de Biasi begins to take photographs in 1944 thanks to a camera found in the rubbles of Nuremberg. He becomes famous with his portraits of actresses such as Claudia Cardinale, Brigitte Bardot or Sophia Loren alongside the depiction of the Iran Shah’s wedding. Yet what earned the Italian photographer the nickname of the ‘Italiano pazzo’ (the mad Italian) was his reports of conflicts such as the Hungarian revolution of 1956 or extreme experiences such as his Siberian exploration, throughout the world. Uniting the glamour of actresses to social episodes, Mario de Biasi created one of his most iconic images thanks to a group of Italian men observing the curvaceous back of Moira Orfei.

Frederick Sommer

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.
The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions

Frederick Sommer

Martha Micali

There is not a minute in my day when I am free of the sensation of walking a footbridge half a meter wide between two yawning chasms of nothingness. And it is this word, “nothing,” that I find every moment on the tip of my tongue…
Sometimes I vent by filling an entire page of the present diary with these sacred syllables, “No-thing.” Then, all of a sudden, confidence restored and self imbued with physical wellbeing, as after a shower or a successful defecation, I turn over a new leaf and start writing things again. How could I do otherwise? If in a game one can only cheat or lose, one cheats.
Ever since I have discovered that my dreams are nearly always self-slanders or spiteful gossip at my expense, I don’t pay them much attention, I simply brush them aside. And yet this latest one, with its masked and menacing folly of unreason, leaves a lump in my throat.

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Giovanni Nogaro

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Dario Mitidieri

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Emme Divi

Marcella Dalla Valle, graduated in Literature, she was born and is currently living in Italy. Also Known as Emme Divi. She is in love with using natural light based on the high contrast and lot of darkness. Her images are a visual dialogue between photography and poetry: the dimention of anxiety, when the image reflects the instinct, nothing is defined, because the wish is the unconscious as an open work.

Franco Pinna

 

He was born in La Maddalena, on July 29, 1925. In 1952 he moved to Rome and, after a brief experience as a cinedocumentary operator, constituted the cooperative Fotografi Associati together with Plinio De Martiis, Caio Mario Garrubba, Nicola Sansone, Pablo Volta, which was dissolved in 1954 due to economic difficulties. He followed the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino during several research expeditions in southern Italy (Lucania, 1952, 1956, 1959, Salento 1959), obtaining documents of great artistic and cultural value. In 1959 he published his first book, entitled La Sila, which was followed by Sardegna una civiltà di pietra (Sardinia, a stone civilization) (1961). Meanwhile, his photos appear in the magazines Life, Stern, Sunday Times, Vogue, Paris Match, Epoca, L’espresso, Panorama. From 1965 Pinna became the trusted photographer of Federico Fellini and made scene photos of his films Giulietta degli spiriti, 1965, up to Fellini’s Casanova in 1976; he also publishes some photo books (I Clowns, Fellini’s Film) inspired by his films. He died suddenly in Rome on April 2, 1978.

Roberto Kusterle

 

Roberto Kusterle was born in Gorizia in 1948, where he still lives and works.

He began with painting and installation in the 1970’s, before identifying photography as the ideal means for his artistic expression.

During the following years the principal themes of his poetics emerged: a continuity between the human, animal and vegetable world, the mediating role of the body, the negation of the gaze, the constant practice of irony, ambiguity and displacement to shape an idea and to make the viewer wonder.

Photography is used to maintain the tension between fiction and reality. Kusterle has a very personal approach to the camera: the actual taking of the picture is only the last step in a complex and articulated creative process.

Giuseppe Di Giulio

Born in Taranto (Italy) in 1977, Giuseppe Di Giulio lives and works in Rome since 1996.
Self-taught photographer, he began taking pictures in 2001 during the university courses to produce a flier for a student association.
Still take pictures only during free time that his profession gives him.
In 2009 he held his first solo show at a club in Rome.
In 2009 his picture “the caress of the wind” has been selected among the finalists of the Metro Photo Challenge Italy.

Luca De Vincentis

I am a fine art photographer based in Rome, Italy. I am fond of those shots that require a great physical effort, as the bond that links me to the model impersonating a certain character makes him feel for a while the pain and hell my heart spent my entire life within.

I love shooting at night between whores and smokey factories – where what I’m hunting for hides. Everything becomes dangerous and irresistible. I love fires, smokes, woods and the fog; people with irregular teeth, sounds in reverse, digestive systems and revolving doors; math, stairs, flesh and the names of prescription drugs.

When I take a shot, I’m not just quietly portraying the world around me. Oceans, cars, mountains and bodies are an extension of my own Calvary. The ultimate proof of the impossibility of life.

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Roberto De Mitri

Like many, the love for photography is something that accompanies me from the first moments of my life. Only in the last few years I have had the material opportunity to devote myself to it with passion, intensity and constancy. I’m not a photographer by profession. And any definition doesn’t affect my passion for photography.

For predisposition and predilection, I make photos exclusively in analog. And I develop my films by myself. 35mm, but especially medium format. I love photography in black and white. And I work mostly with long exposures of landscapes and urban contexts. I am completely self-taught. The little or very little that I know about photography, I’ve learned it by experience. Instinct and experience. Sensitivity and experience. Failures and experience.

What I try to recreate through my photos, what I try to bring out through them, is a feeling of alienation and loneliness.

Cities are like shells of social exclusion, crowded with ghosts. Individuals alone and isolated, alien to themselves and towards others. Anonymous faceless souls.

The landscapes of the sea are cold sterile lunar surfaces. Lifeless and unable to accommodate its seeds. Distant landscapes, perhaps dispersed in space, perhaps promised lands never existed.

This is the human condition. Unease, alienation, loneliness, lack of communication, dereliction.

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Ugo Mulas

Mulas began his studies in law in 1948 in Milan, but left to take art courses at the Brera Fine Arts Academy.[1] In 1954 he was asked to cover the Venice Biennale, his first professional assignment. He went on to photograph every Venice Biennale through 1972 and to document his work in an art book.

Mulas worked for a number of Italian magazines and did commercial work for advertising campaigns including clients such as Pirelli and Olivetti. In 1959 in Florence, Mulas discovered Veruschka who later became a well-known model and artist. While covering the Spoleto Festival in 1962, Mulas befriended sculptor Alexander Calder, who later became a major subject of Mulas’ photography and writings.

While photographing the 1964 Venice Biennale, Mulas met several American artists, art critics, and the art dealer Leo Castelli. This meeting led to his travel to New York City and his documentation of the Pop art scene. This trip to New York and Mulas’ resulting book and exhibits, New York, the New Art Scene became Mulas’ best known work. The exhibit included enlargements of Mulas’ contact sheets and environmental portraits of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman and Roy Lichtenstein.[2]

Mulas died in Milan following several years of serious illness.

Marco Michieletto

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Mauro De Bettio

Difficult to express, but I’m quite sure photography is for me my primary way of speaking.
In my life I had the chance to visit wonderful places and especially to meet great people.
My purpose is, and has always been, capture the feeling of what I “touch”, not just the appearance of it.
Capture the essence and express the nuances of a person in just one frame showing those subtleties that can be hard to describe in words.
Reproducing every emotion, from happiness to sadness, from fear to excitement.
Through simply showing an images, evoke an emotion in someone else, make people stop and think.
Stop them in their tracks just with a glance at an image.
Photography is a fantastic story-telling medium.
Just ask yourself what story you want to tell, and photography can get you there.

Mauro De Bettio (born March 4, 1975) lives now in Barcelona, Spain.

Mario Tursi

Mario Tursi was born in Rome on 9th August 1929 from a family of photographer; his father was a photoengraver and his mother a photographer and manager of photographic labs.

Since an early age he began to use the camera. In the years 1943-44 he made his professional apprenticeship working as “street photographer” for Studio Lombardini.Soon after the Liberation he was hired by Felice Giordani, official Vatican photographer, for whom he worked for a couple of years, until 1948 when he started as photo reporter for agency VEDO (Visioni Editoriali Diffuse Ovunque), the most important Italian agency at the time, run by Adolfo Porry Pastotel. He began to work also for the Associated Press and made several reportages around the world.

In 1956 he took over the agency VEDO and became the manager. During that time he started to go on film sets for some specials. Within years, his visits on film sets from irregular became more and more frequent, extended also to international productions. In 1962, with Mare matto directed by Renato Castellani, he debuted as still photographer, followed by, two years later, Let’s Talk About Men by Lina Wertmuller.

Closed down the agency VEDO in 1965, he definitely focused on cinema photography beginning, among other things, working with Visconti, who wanted him on the set of all his latest films.

Since then he has worked with mainly all of the major Italian directors from Pasolini to Petri, from Rosi to Lattuada to Scola. He worked a lot also with younger directors such as Giuseppe Bertolucci, Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni. Often he was asked to work abroad as recorded by the films The name of the Rose by Annaud, Pirates by Polanski, The Last Temptation of Christ by Scorsese and The Horseman on the Roof by Rappeneau.

In 1979 he received a special mention for the still photographs taken for Stay as You Are during the 8th edition of “The Hollywood Reporter” Key Art Awards and, in 1989, he won in Cannes the Grand Prix of Cinema Photography for the shots on The Last Temptation of Christ. In recent years he followed the making of Kundun by Scorsese, Dangerous Beauty by Herskovits, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Hoffman, Titus by Taymor and U-571 by Mostow. His last work was on the set of Gangs of New York by Martin Scorsese, film he recorded entirely.

Considered among the greatest still photographers of Italian cinema, Mario Tursi died in Roma on 1st September 2008.

Franco Pinna

Franco Pimna was an Italian photographer of the second half of the 20th century and one of the main representatives of neorealism. He developed his work in black and white.

He was born in La Maddalena, on July 29, 1925. In 1952 he moved to Rome and, after a brief experience as a cinedocumentary operator, constituted the cooperative Fotografi Associati together with Plinio De Martiis, Caio Mario Garrubba, Nicola Sansone, Pablo Volta, which was dissolved in 1954 due to economic difficulties. He followed the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino during several research expeditions in southern Italy, obtaining documents of great artistic and cultural value. In 1959 he published his first book, entitled La Sila, which was followed by Sardegna una civiltà di pietra . Meanwhile, his photos appear in the magazines Life, Stern, Sunday Times, Vogue, Paris Match, Epoca, L’espresso, Panorama. From 1965 Pinna became the trusted photographer of Federico Fellini and made scene photos of his films Giulietta degli spiriti, up to Fellini’s Casanova in 1976; he also publishes some photo books inspired by his films. He died suddenly in Rome on April 2, 1978.

Matteo Carta

Born in Sardinia 33 years ago. I have been living in China since 2009 and at the moment I live in Kunming, Yunnan. Travel and Nikon enthusiast

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