Franco Fontana (born 9 December 1933) is an Italian photographer. He is best known for his abstract colour landscapes.
Franco Fontana (born 9 December 1933) is an Italian photographer. He is best known for his abstract colour landscapes.
Franco Fontana was born in 1933 in Modena. He started taking photographs in the 1950s when he was working as a decorator in a furniture showroom. [1] In 1961 he joined a local amateur club in Modena. The experience would be a turning point in his career, and Fontana went on to have his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Società Fotografica Subalpina, Turin [1] and at the Galleria della Sala di Cultura in Modena in 1968. Since then he has participated in more than 400 group and solo exhibitions. [2]
Fontana has photographed for advertising campaigns for brands such as Fiat, Volkswagen, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, Snam, Sony, Volvo, Versace, Canon, Kodak, Robe di Kappa, Swissair, and has been a magazine photographer for publications including Time, Life, Vogue (USA and France), Venerdì di Repubblica, Panorama , and with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The New York Times .[ citation needed ]
Fontana's first book, Skyline, was published in 1978 in France by Contrejour and in Italy by Punto e Virgola with a text by Helmut Gernsheim.
Fontana is the art director of the Toscana Fotofestival. [3]
He has received numerous awards, such as the 1989 Tokyo Photographer Society of Japan - The 150 Years of Photography - Photographer Award.[ citation needed ]
Fontana is especially interested in the interplay of colours. [4] His early innovations in colour photography in the 1960s were stylistically disruptive. According to art critic Giuliana Scimé, Fontana "destroyed all the structures, practices, and technical choices within the Italian tradition." [5] [6] Fontana uses 35mm cameras, and as noted by Iwan Zahar, deploys distant viewpoints with telephoto lenses to flatten contours in a landscape of crops and fields into bands of intense, saturated colour. [7] This is an effect that Franco Lefèvre has described as 'dialectical landscapism'. [1] Of his use of colour in his 2019 retrospective exhibition Sintesi ('Synthesis') at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, curator Diana Baldon has observed;
“His bold geometric compositions are characterised by shimmering colours, level perspectives and a geometric-formalist and minimal language...By adopting this approach during the 1960s, Fontana injected a new vitality into the field of creative colour photography for then multicolour was not in fashion in art photography...The way Fontana shoots, dematerialises the objects photographed, which loose three-dimensionality and realism to become part of an abstract drawing”. [8]
Aside from the rural landscape Fontana has applied his graphic sensibility to other subjects: city architecture, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude.
Fontana's photographs have also been used as album cover art for records produced by the ECM Records jazz label.
 | This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(January 2020) |
The Salimbeni Prize is awarded by the Fondazione Salimbeni per le Arti Figurative of San Severino Marche to honour excellence in the writing of art history on an Italian subject. The Premio Salimbeni was established in 1983.
Bruno Munari was "one of the greatest actors of 20th-century art, design and graphics". He was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity. On the utility of art, Munari once said, "Art shall not be separated from life: things that are good to look at, and bad to be used, should not exist".
Franco Scepi is an Italian artist, graphic designer and film director.
The 1963–64 Serie A season was won by Bologna.
Luigi Ghirri was an Italian artist and photographer whose work was about the relationship between fiction and reality. Ghirri has been the subject of numerous books. His works are held by various museums around the world and have been exhibited in the 2011 Venice Biennale and at MAXXI in Rome.
The Galleria Estense is an art gallery in the heart of Modena, centred around the collection of the d’Este family: rulers of Modena, Reggio and Ferrara from 1289 to 1796. Located on the top floor of the Palazzo dei Musei, on the St. Augustine square, the museum showcases a vast array of works ranging from fresco and oil painting to marble, polychrome and terracotta sculpture; musical instruments; numismatics; curios and decorative antiques.
Franco Fortini was the pseudonym of Franco Lattes, an Italian poet, writer, translator, essayist, literary critic and Marxist intellectual.
Luca Campigotto is an Italian artist photographer and writer.
Gabriele Basilico was an Italian photographer who defined himself as "a measurer of space".
Francesco Luigi Simone is an Italian singer-songwriter, composer and television host, known as "il poeta con la chitarra" for the poetical value of his lyrics.
Osvaldo Coluccino is an Italian composer and poet.
Gianni Berengo Gardin is an Italian photographer who has concentrated on reportage and editorial work, but whose career as a photographer has encompassed book illustration and advertising.
Rhodri Jones is a Welsh documentary photographer based in Bologna, Italy. He has exhibited widely and has published several volumes of photography. His work has been carried by the Panos Pictures photographic agency since 1992.
Gianni Pezzani, is an Italian photographer.
The Italian photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin has been the sole contributor or a major contributor to a large number of photobooks from 1960 to the present.
Sergio Sarra is an Italian artist and former basketball player.
Italo Zannier is an Italian art historian, photographer, academic and historian of photography.
During the 1945–1946 season Associazione Calcio Torino competed in Divisione Nazionale.
Pino Musi is an Italian photographer and visual artist currently based in Paris. His subjects have included modern architecture, classical ruins, steel mills, rural architecture and urban cityscapes viewed as pure forms and abstract art. His photographs have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of the Ara Pacis in Rome, and galleries in Italy, Germany, England, France and Switzerland.
Augusto De Luca is an Italian photographer specialized in portraits.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
