Short Essay

Photography is thus used to understand broad ranging group phenomena, in the attempt to build up a coherent narrative that can analyze and explain contemporary crunch points.

The title alludes to the possibility that the photograph is more than a mere beach scene of summer holiday-makers, but instead questions human intent and judgement.

Portugal claimed these islands in the fifteenth century; Columbus called here to hear Mass on his way home from America.

Repetition is a subversive tool, a forum for questioning or even dissolving the authority of an individual or their particular performance as well as of patterns or structures. Narcissus eschews Echo because he thinks that she makes fun of him when repeating his words.

Space is “a tridimensional extension without any limits in which objects and events have directions and relative positions to one another”.

"Civilization. The Way We Live Now" is an exhibition curated by William Ewing, Bartomeu Marí and Holly Roussell Perret-Gentil that will open on October 2018 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. I will be featured in the exhibition with some of my works and I am happy to share with you the concept of it.

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.

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.