Although the subjects typically become part of an anonymous, teeming mass of humanity, unfortunate individuals captured at less than flattering angles and moments sometimes stand out from the crowd.

“Florence is this mixture of fantastic, very geometric Renaissance buildings, in concert with today’s sellers and Japanese tourists and policemen… that’s something I really like.”

A day printing at Colorzenith in Milan with my studio assistants. Chronicle from the ordinary life of a photographer.

It was the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, a contemporary of Léger, who in his 1915 publication Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) released the quality of painterliness from the artistic genre of painting, defining it instead as a general stylistic category. Since then it has been clear that painterly thinking is not carried out exclusively in oil on canvas.

One day last year I was standing on top of my scaffolding when a couple went by and I overheard them saying, “Look at that idiot, he thinks he’s Massimo Vitali!''.

Joerg Colberg: "So pure chance – getting one of your cameras stolen and then being left with another one – does play a role for a photographer, maybe even more often than many people realize, doesn’t it?"

Conviviality is something I defend at work - the best conversation happens over good food. People who eat together stick together.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my followers around the world!
MV

This past Sunday I was part of a panel to discuss the general state of photography in Italy, organized by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Affairs (MIBACT). A part of the PhotoLux Festival in Lucca, the event was the 19th and final MIBACT meeting to evaluate this supposed state. [...]
For me the biggest problem is that there is no understanding of where we started, and so we cannot find a common denominator between a photojournalist and a food photographer, a “fine art” (I hate that term) photographer and medical documentary photography. There is no in-depth knowledge, and so everything exists in a messy melting pot. In order to overcome these divisions in photography, we must first accept that these divisions do indeed exist.

If it were not for the occasional visibility of a camera or a car (Vitali must have worked to exclude such items from his photographic field), we could be watching them in the second millennium BC—even in deeper prehistory or at the dawn of human time (gathering by the pools at Olduvai, perhaps). And if it were not for our familiarity—our empathetic identification—with the social biped Homo sapiens, we could be observing terns, seals, gazelles, or wolves.

The plateau has therefore always been a feature that permits an overall view by means of a general view, of observation as theory and supervision. Whoever wishes to lead, to make revelations or inspire has to prove himself or herself a visionary. But he cannot just stubbornly stare ahead; he has to comprehend the panorama of the world in its unity and a whole.