Biography
I discovered photography when I was a seventeen years old student. With the first camera, experiments and experiences, the doors of what I still consider a magic world opened to me. I thought, in order to completely dedicate myself to photography, I had to become a professional. But I soon realised that that magic was too important to me. I developed autonomously my photographic research; I started reading lots of books and magazines; I carried on personal projects. It all supported what are now a solid knowledge and an educated mind, both theoretically and practically.
First, it was black and white photography about which I soon understood how important the print process is. I could not anymore delegate it to somebody else. To obtain the true correspondent to my photographic idea, I had to print my own work. In terms of photographic subjects, a good deal of my early production is constituted by portraits and still lifes. My portraits, in particular, clearly show my favourable attitude towards fashion photography, which I have always liked. Technically, I was more and more fascinated by Pictorialist artists’ approach to the medium and their photographic results.
I then experimented on the late Nineteenth Century print techniques, from those using iron salts, like blueprint or Van Dick print, to those implying pigments in binding substances like Arabic rubber or oil, which I later abandoned because of the too many variables implied. The historical developments of photography have always interested me, and not only technically speaking.
My work is addressed to Iperrealism and to the shooting of metaphisical spaces; I like to reflect on ‘other significations’ of what I see. I always favour the film, even if I have digital cameras. It allows me to think longer and better before the end of the shooting. I fell I am fully controlling all the variables! In black and white, for example, I can combine a certain film with a certain developer; so doing, I do not obtain ‘a result’ but ‘the result’; the one I had on my mind. The same with regard to the light; it is never any light. And digital photography, in my opinion, does not allow this. In 2005 I started working quite regularly with an infrared black and white film, since it brings a certain degree of abstraction to my photographs and, in this case, I do use also a digital camera. The film is then scanned, but I never modify the negative or slide within this process. Any intervention is reduced to the minimum; I am not tempted to improve my shootings’ results. I then transfer the digital file on fine art paper, through a photographic printer of high quality standard. In my work, the final result is always very close to the original creative intention. I will soon start experimenting on a large format pinhole camera as well as on toy cameras recently acquired.
Any author as such has a message, a thought, an opinion which should be made available to everybody, and today, more than ever, I want my work to be appreciated by a larger public. The new media are definitely both inspiring and helpful in this sense. I do not believe that every work of art wants to be interpreted.
Despite of the fact that photography has eventually come to be considered as art, in Italy it still strives to get the attention of mass media and major art galleries. Compared to the USA or Germany, for example, Italy is far behind, as its glorious past was a brake to move on; good Italian photographers still need to turn or move to foreign countries to find recognition.
To define myself, I would say ‘I am an author’, and not ‘I am an artist’; time is the real judge. To define art, I would only be able to be as specific as the philosopher Dino Formaggio, who wrote: ‘Art is everything men consider as art’.
