MASSIMO VITALI
Massimo Vitali was born in Como, Italy, in 1944. He moved to London after high school, where he studied Photography at the London College of Printing. In the early 60s, he started working as a photojournalist, collaborating with several magazines and agencies in Italy and Europe. He becomes an activist photographer. At the beginning of the Eighties, his growing distrust in the belief that photography had an absolute capacity to reproduce the subtleties of reality led to a career change. He began working as a cinematographer for television and cinema. However, his relationship with the still camera never ceased, and he eventually turned his attention back to «photography» as a means for artistic research. In 1995 he commenced the Beach Series in light of drastic political changes in Italy. Massimo started to observe his fellow countrymen very carefully. He depicted a “sanitized, complacent view of Italian normalities”, while at the same time revealing “the inner conditions and disturbances of normality: its cosmetic fakery, sexual innuendo, commodified leisure, deluded sense of affluence, and rigid conformism”. He currently divides his time between Lucca, Italy and Berlin. His fame is only equalled by the great number of exhibitions of his work held all over the world. His oeuvres are part of the permanent collection of the New York Guggenheim Museum, the Fondation Cartier in Paris, as well as the personal collection of American movie stars such as Cameron Diaz.