A retrospective of leading Italian photographer Franco Fontana, 81, will be on show at Rome's Palazzo Incontro starting Wednesday through January 11. The exhibit will showcase 130 of the most significant photos by the Modena native, who describes himself as a "heretic".
"I chose color when everybody was taking pictures in black and white, I chose landscapes and cities when everyone was doing political and social reportage," he said on the eve of the exhibit's opening.
The show will display the master's most famous series, from the urban landscapes of his debut in 1961 to the photos taken over the last decades - including American swimming pools, vintage cars and other iconic images. Known for the bands and curving swathes of bright, intensely saturated colors criss-crossing the flat perspectives of his fields, deserts, and seascapes, the artist refuses to label his work as abstract.
"The only abstract thing about them is the thought behind them, but what I have been photographing throughout my life is real," commented the aging master, who is proud of the fact that he never uses Photoshop or any other digital retouching program.
The large-scale prints opening the show date back almost half a century.
"The ambiguity of his vision is a mix of poetry and passion," said curator Denis Curti.
"He reinvented the visual vocabulary of an era".
By eschewing narrative and choosing instead to focus on images in which nothing appears to be happening, Fontana opened up a kind of meditation filled with references to Pop Art, to the painterly metaphysics of Giorgio de Chirico and the crystalline atmospheres of Edward Hopper, whose canvases are peopled with alienated individuals caught in vivid, almost violent colors.
Very much a part of his homeland and his era, Fontana's visual culture takes us on a voyage through layers of history and time, both social and individual.
"By the end of the exhibit, one feels one is gazing at an immense self-portrait," said Curti.
Currently, the photographer has turned his gaze elsewhere.
"For me, photography is the quality that life has given me," said the artist, whose latest book focuses on the beauty of disabled people.
"I could have carried on doing the landscapes that made me famous, but then I would have been playing Fontana for the rest of my life, a kind of pensioner version of myself," he concluded.
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