It was the painter Elio de Zanna who gave me the inspiration to immerse myself into nature’s magical world of Cortina d’Ampezzo, where I was born in 1945; in Venice I attended art high school, finishing my artistic studies at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. I stopped painting because I perceived it to be, at that time, an art in evident decline.
Nevertheless, I’ve always been an artist. I decided to take the path of the photographer and I have walked it all through till the end without ever betraying my passions. This has meant that today I can devote myself to photography as well as other forms of art by analysing things with a thousand eyes through images and artistic installations.
I extensively worked for publishers, trying to go beyond the limits of this industry, fighting on a terrain where photography was considered to be marginal and merely for documentation.
Thanks to the many years of collaboration with school publishers I managed to develop a particular sensitivity in observing the multiple aspects of life, focusing my lens with a special attention onto the world of childhood.
With photography, I also discovered that there is no single way of being: the slums, the prostitutes, the gypsies were all subjects I photographed and from whom I learned what it means to be different.
To make a living, I also had to work for advertising, fashion, still life, experimenting, sometimes with satisfactory results.
My recent years have been dedicated to reorganizing my photographic archive, I thus now realize how many issues I have faced, how far I have travelled and in which unusual manners I photographed, for example reinventing the tale of Pinocchio on the streets of New York, documenting the day-to-day life of a young shepherd apprentice from Bergamo, or mapping the world with grains of coloured rice for a monograph.
