Masters of photography
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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Ferdinando Scianna started taking photographs in the 1960s while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo. It was then that he began to photograph the Sicilian people systematically. Feste Religiose in Sicilia (1965) included an essay by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, and it was the first of many collaborations with famous writers.
Scianna moved to Milan in 1966. The following year he started working for the weekly magazine L’Europeo, first as a photographer, then from 1973 as a journalist. He also wrote on politics for Le Monde Diplomatique and on literature and photography for La Quinzaine Littéraire.
In 1977 he published Les Siciliens in France and La Villa Dei Mostri in Italy. During this period Scianna met Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in 1982 he joined Magnum Photos. He entered the field of fashion photography in the late 1980s. At the end of the decade he published a retrospective, Le Forme del Caos (1989).
Scianna returned to exploring the meaning of religious rituals with Viaggio a Lourdes (1995), then two years later he published a collection of images of sleepers – Dormire Forse Sognare (To Sleep, Perchance to Dream). His portraits of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges were published in 1999, and in the same year the exhibition Niños del Mundo displayed Scianna’s images of children from around the world.
In 2002 Scianna completed Quelli di Bagheria, a book on his home town in Sicily, in which he tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of his youth through writings and photographs of Bagheria and the people who live there.
Valerio Bispuri was born in Rome in 1971 and after graduating in Literature he decided to devote his attention to photography. Professional reporter since 2001 he collaborates with numerous Italian and international magazines, among which L’Espresso, Il Venerdì, Internazionale, Le Monde, Stern. He has carried out reportages in Africa, Asia, Middle East, but it is in Latin America that Valerio worked the longest and has lived in Buenos Aires for more than a decade.
He has worked on “Encerrados” for 10 years, a long term photographic project on the life conditions in 74 prisons across all the countries in the South American continent, describing with an anthropological and journalistic approach, the inmates’ reality. This work has been exhibited at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, at the University of Geneva, at the Browse Festival in Berlin and, in October 2014, at the Bronx Documentary Center of New York.
In November 2014 “Encerrados” became a book edited by Contrasto.
In 2015 Valerio finished another important photographic project that lasted for 8 years, denouncing the diffusion and the effects of a new low-cost drug called “Paco” that is killing an entire generation of youths in the suburbs of South American large cities. The work on “Paco” has been exhibited in Rome, Milan and Istanbul (catalogue published by International Green Cross).
Born on October, 5th 1984 in Cagliari, Sardinia (Italy).
At a very young age he started to draw focusing solely on the black and white creations.
The monochrome has quickly became his natural habitat when he has encountred the world of Photography.
Thanks to some of his masters, especially Elliott Erwitt and Richard Kalvar, he promptly met what is now generally called “street photography”.
In 2014, he left Sardinia and moved to Bologna in the Italian mainland where he currently lives and works.
I’ve started taking photos during my last year of university, when I moved back to my hometown. I was bored and lonely, so I decided to start a relationship with a camera. The only model I had was myself, that’s why I started an endless journey about self portraits. With the time I’ve improved my skills and made some friends, so I’ve started to test my camera on other people too. It was interesting. Girls are still my favorite subjects, intimate atmospheres and strong feelings are what I want to capture. Then, I sometimes like find a good song, because even images often need a soundtrack.
The Roma are a distinct ethnic minority originating from Northwestern India and living all over Europe and America. Their total population has recently been esteemed to be more than 14 millions. They usually form a separate social group, only partially integrated into the societies and countries where they live. A history of discrimination, persecution and killings – culminating with the Nazi holocaust – has pushed the Roma and other related minorities (Sinti etc.) to the margins of society, making them one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged minorities in Europe. Many Roma continue to face widespread racism and discrimination and to get limited access to basic rights and services and are almost unrepresented in public and political life. As a result, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, lack of formal education, substandard housing are commonplace among them.
The photographer’s work on the Roma started in the late ’90s, in several Roma camps scattered around Italy (Rome, Naples, Bologna). In 2015, he returned to Bosnia on the tracks of their culture. From Mostar to Sarajevo, Roma people live in the outskirts of cities in labyrinthic villages consisting of shacks or small houses and keep more faithful to ancient traditions than more nomadic groups who moved to the West and got influenced by richer and consumeristic societies.
This story intends to tell Roma’s unvarnished truth, beyond stereotypes and ignorance still surrounding them, benefiting from a very close and intimate look and revealing unknown aspects of their emotions and culture.
