Deserted, unspoiled beaches are often associated with perfection. As I was walking along the beach on one of those perfect days in early June, I suddenly flashed on a particularly compelling photograph by Massimo Vitali—one of his famous crowded beach scenes viewed from a great distance, with throngs of people milling about like miniature dots along the Italian shoreline. I was struck by the contrast of his vision of beauty and the desolate beach ahead of me.
Vitali is known for his complex and arresting panoramic photographs. He prefers that his work not be simplified as merely “beautiful,” though he admits that, on the surface, his pictures are much nicer than he would like them to be. I myself have always found Vitali’s placement of humans dwarfed against vast natural landscapes to be strangely sobering.
In that moment, I found myself longing for the vitality abundant in Vitali’s images—a human dimension to juxtapose against the pristine natural scene I was experiencing. I went back to look at his photographs and realized that Vitali had gotten at something… a struggle with which I am all too familiar: how to marry the complex, difficult, often messy human realities with the surface dimensions of style and fashion. I was compelled to dive straight into the center of this contrast between the perfect and the imperfect, between the light of possibility and the darkness of human destiny, between human fragility and the eternal power of the natural world. So I headed to Lucca, Italy, to meet with the man who has made a career out of capturing these contradictions in single frames.
My first exchange with Vitali came in an email from his iPhone and went like this: “Can you do it a bit later? I am photographing the Pope”—as casual and direct as if he were telling me he had an errand to run. I found him to be just as laid-back in person. We met in the morning for an espresso at his usual spot in Piazza San Michele. Vitali arrived on a state-of-the-art bicycle, wearing Birkenstocks and a black puffer vest.
Returning to his home and studio afterward, we jumped right in: “You have the landscape, you have the sociological and tropological art and other things—the more people get out of it, the better it is for me,” he says. As he walks me through the layers of his images, I ask whether he considers his work a study of the human condition. “I hope so,” he replies, “that it’s contradicting, that it’s not only nice pictures, girls in bikinis and blue sea… I hope there is more. The beach is a good place to try to understand the way we are, the way we behave.”
