The invention of free time is relatively recent. It affects the affluent and changing society, and its relations with consumption. Leisure is illusory and instead the economic and social forces take over individual free time and sell it to each of us like they were goods.

In conversation with Silvia Camporesi about privacy rules and location permits.
Sorry, only for Italian speakers!

The French people are more controlled, I’m not saying that it’s not good, but it is a difference that I find between the beaches in Italy and France. In Italy it’s a bit more “without rules”.

"It may seem strange, but a long time ago I even ended up in jail for not having taken a picture that the judge said I should have taken, although I don’t want to rehash these sad and painful stories."
— Massimo Vitali

From the point of view of technique and method, Vitali’s photographs have a far away historic precedent that is little known, that of the commercial photographer Eugene. O. Goldbeck, an exception in the panorama of photography popular between the Twenties and Forties where the names Lewis H. Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Margaret Bourke-White and Berenice Abbott dominate uncontested.

I think the people that I photograph are purging their sins and getting something from water and nature. Tomorrow they start working, fighting, having problems again – but at that moment on that day, they’re free.

While it is true that the majority of the photographs I take these days are digital, two years ago I had a large format film camera made by Alessandro Gibellini of Gibellini Project, just in case I feel the need to shoot film again.

When I realized that after thirty years of photography I still didn’t know who was in front of my lens, I started to follow carefully the work of contemporary photography masters, but then I turned back to the classics of the last century, to the work of pioneers like Atget and Le Gray. Why are their works still so contemporary?

This is the first in a series of posts about my old and new equipment: cameras, lenses, light meters, platforms... Some of them are not currently in use, but I don’t want to sell them because they have sentimental value. All the equipment finds its place in my studio, in the so-called "gabbia", the "cage" where the negatives are kept sometime together with rogue assistants.

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.