(b Senigallia, Ancona, 1 Aug 1925). Italian photographer. A self-taught painter from the age of 13 and a printer by profession, he began working as a photographer in the early 1950s and quickly developed an intense and personal style, rendering poetic, dream-like visions in strongly contrasting blacks and whites. From the start he worked on a range of themes that closely reflect his concerns for the life of the rural communities of his birthplace; he also extensively documented the often miserable living conditions of the old, poor and sick, with great intensity of feeling and uncompromising directness. Although he sometimes worked on commissions, mainly for the national television company, his best works spring from the need to exorcise his personal obsession with decay, death and old age. Consequently, he intensely disliked documentary photography and printed only the images that reveal his experience, rejecting those that appear to be 'just taken by the camera'. He generally used a simple twin-lens reflex Kobel press camera, with an 80 mm lens and no exposure meter, allowing himself the maximum technical freedom in the taking and developing of the images. He regarded landscape as a subject comparable to the human face and explored its possibilities throughout his career.
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