Alessio Delfino

Born in Savona (Italy), 5 March 1976, Delfino lives in Albisola and works in Savona and Milan. Delfino’s approach to photography began in his youth. As a photographer and advertising creative in Italy for the last 12 years, Delfino also remains in close contact with the world of fashion and design. For Delfino, photography is a way to create images, a privilege once reserved only to painting. Instead of copying the world, images project the artist’s conscience, in a manner that is both timeless and without any specific spatial reference. His works are exhibited in galleries and museums in Italy and abroad.

Letizia Battaglia

Born in Sicily in 1935, Letizia Battaglia began her photography career in the early 1970s and started photographing the Sicilian Mafia in 1974, even receiving death threats. As the photography director of L’Ora, Palermo’s left-wing daily newspaper, she or one of her assistants was present at every major crime scene in the city until shortly before the paper folded in 1990. From these assignments, Battaglia and her long-time partner Franco Zecchin produced many of the iconic photographs that have come to represent Sicily and the Mafia throughout the world.
She has won numerous awards, including the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography and the Cornell Capa Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography.

Massimo Berruti

Massimo Berruti was born in Rome in 1979 and became interested in documentary photography for the first time in 2003, while he was at university. He left university in 2004 and took part in a collective project on the cultural and industrial crisis in Italy. This led to the book Made in Italy, published in 2006. In 2007 he was one of the 20 photographers worldwide selected by the Italian Ministry of Artistic/Cultural Heritage and Activities for a reportage on the status of the Italian heritage and landscapes. Since 2008, he has worked in central Asia, focusing on the changing society in Pakistan. His work has appeared in major Italian and international publications, such as l’Espresso, Vanity Fair, Internazionale, Paris Match, Le Monde2, The Independent, Time, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. Berruti was a member of the 2008 Joop Swart Masterclass, and won a World Press Photo award in 2007. Other honors include two POYi prizes, a Visa D’Or Young Reporter Award in 2009 and two IPA (International Photography Awards). His work has appeared in exhibitions at Lumix, Visa Pour l’Image and Noorderlicht, among others. From 2005 to 2009, Berruti was represented by the Grazia Neri Photo Agency and in 2008 joined Agence Vu as a member photographer.

Martina Bacigalupo

Martina Bacigalupo is a photographer and picture editor of the French magazine 6 Mois. She is a member of Agence VU in Paris, France.
After studying philosophy and literature in Genoa, Italy, Martina Bacigalupo went to East Africa where she worked for ten years as a freelance photographer, collaborating with magazines, foundations and international organizations. Her work, which has consistently interrogated the visual dynamics between Africa and the West, is today part of the Artur Walther Collection. Martina Bacigalupo received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award in
Instagram: @martibaccifoto

Mattia Baldi

I’m impressed by how the human perception of beauty is changing. Modern technologies are going to make us see things that don’t exist, argument reality, our faces will be perceived like we want. A Hollywood star, a friend we love, a teacher we like. How we look like, the natural impression that our biological self gives to the others will be gradually less important in the next future. I always like a kind of photography that designs an idea, a composition of shadows using real-life elements. If photography is based on something that is not the reality is not photography but something else.
I like when models that use to see themselves in their promotional comp cards, Instagram posts, and magazine advertising react to my work in a very emotional way. Most of them have never seen their face in the way I shot them, let’s say natural and without enhancement of any kind. I’m happily surprised that they like my work and they ask me to shoot more or they recommend their models friends to me. I guess that is a good sign, people still want to have a memory of what they look like, or they are happy to see themselves in a more honest way. The vibe of my work is not celebratory, doesn’t tend to extra-valorize the subjects, wants to be raw content of reality. Especially here where I’m living, Bangkok, the beauty standards are a complicated matter. Thai people pass more time on SM than anyone else and the young generations are growing up with virtual digital standards of beauty. It will be amazing to realize one book per city all around the world to check the status of a wide spectrum of humanity. People who are working in the system or that are trying but fail for some aesthetic reason all around the world.
I’m fully focused on the book project “Casting” right now. The first book will be all about Bangkok and the models, actresses and dancers professional and beginners that are living and working in Bangkok now. The project will be in the format of one book-volume per city, all around the world. After Bangkok: New York, Paris, and Milan. The project has SM pages in order to create a community of models/women that will share their stories about their casting’s experiences, appearance insecurities, and how to live life as a woman in the age of digital media. Working with models’ agencies for my commercial work and doing castings have always intrigued me beyond being just a job, but I have also been blindly unaware of the reason for that until recently I found out why. Growing up collecting Interview Magazine, the magazine founded by the American artist Andy Warhol in 1969, I sharpened my artistic sensibility by learning from the magazine’s interviews, Warhol’s screen tests, and all of his work concerning castings. It was a perfect way to explore and understand the human condition and show the side of the people of which I find interesting. Instagram, influencers, and “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” were all predicted by Warhol. Overflow of images, a spillover of information and intrusive consumerism that were once just bad omens are today our reality.

Website: http://www.mattiabaldi.com/bookscasting

Pepi Merisio

Pepi Merisio was primarily inspired by the 1950s growing up. New York City became the focus for modernism on an international scale during the Post-War period. Many artists had travelled to the city during the Second World War, fleeing in exile from Europe. This led to a substantial pooling of talent and ideas. Influential Europeans such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers and Hans Hoffmann provided inspiration for American artists whilst in New York, and influenced cultural growth in the United States for many later decades. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Frank Kline, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Adolph Gottlieb were influential artists of this time. The male dominated environment has been subsequently revisited to recognise the contributions of female artists such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Bourgeois, amongst others

Jacopo Della Valle

I was born in Rome in 1979 and I was passionate about photography and reportage from an early age. I started shooting during my second grade with the Fujica ST701 belonging to my father, who liked films and trasmitted this love to me.

I graduated in Scenography at the Accademia delle Belli Arti with honors and I developed a great passion for travel photography. I traveled throughout Europe, in the United States, Cuba and Morocco before starting my reportages along Asia: I went to Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, China and India. Fascinated by Asian culture and guided by the readings of Tiziano Terzani, I always tried to get in touch with the local populations to know – and experience – their characteristic uses, customs and traditions, avoiding the superficiality of the tourist traps. For this reason I embarked on long journeys to discover different Asian ethnic minorities, who live in tribes that are difficult to reach and that still survive globalization.
Among all pictures I prefer the portraits, because they give me the chance to capture the history and the deeper essence of the people in front of me. There are people with whom I shared a lot and others with whom there was only a brief meeting, but in all situations I used the camera to make a connection with the other and to try to represent the soul through a poem of colors. In fact, it’s the camera that I often use to communicate with people so distant from us, who do not speak our own language but are so rich in curiosity and emotions.
Through my photos I would like to share with you my passion and the intensity of my experiences, which do not only testify the different anthropological realities, but they want to pay a great tribute to the different cultures that surround and enrich us.

Andrea Giacobbe

Andrea Giacobbe attended the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art and Design, presently Arts University Bournemouth.
Editorial credits include Dazed&Confused, TheNewYorkTimesMagazine, AMagazineCuratedBy, TheFace, RayGun, Spin, Arena, Flaunt, Citizen K, MarieClaire, Donna, Detour, Cube, Dedicate, Wad, Soup and Photo.
Advertising credits include Nike and Diesel.
Film work is comprised of award-winning music videos, commercials and short films.
Was part of the group exhibition “Archeology of Elegance 1980-2000 : twenty years of fashion photography” at Deichtorhallen, in Hamburg.
Book publications include “The Impossible Image” (Mark Sanders – Phaidon Press, 2000) and “Archeology of Elegance” (Marion de Beaupre – Rizzoli, 2002).

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.

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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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.