Massimo Vitali: una storia italiana is not, as one might believe, the catalog of an exhibition or a volume of photography criticism. It is much more: it is an accurate microscopical investigation into the subjects and techniques used by the artist and on everything that lays “behind the image”, as Federico Zeri would have said; it is also a story of how one should approach Vitali’s work, reconstructing its history and culture. […]
Although they might seem so, Massimo Vitali’s photographs are anything but snapshots immortalising the fleeting moment: they require a very long preparation, the construction of a special “viewing” space (a 7 meters high platform) and long wait times; nor are they reassuring postcards from summer and winter leisure places, rather betraying in the undercurrent a sometimes even caustic reflection on society.
It is precisely on the long creative process, on the cultural substratum that animates these pictures overflowing with references to other art forms, from cinema to performing arts, that Noemi Pittaluga focuses, who with her trained eye identifies Vitali’s story with an all-Italian story, in a long trajectory the goes from Renaissance masterpieces to Venetian landscape paintings, from the cinema of the economic boom to the photo-reportage of the Fascist massacres of the 70s. […]
