Biography
“Since my school days I’ve been interested in photography and my interest went on forever with ups and downs. At a very late age, I started realizing that only following strict concepts I would have really achieved what I had been looking for my all life. Luckily enough, my early fifties coincided with photography becoming contemporary art. I jumped on the bandwagon and maybe it worked for me.”
Massimo Vitali series of Italian beach panoramas began in 1994, in the light of drastic political changes in Italy. He started to observe his fellow countrymen very carefully. He depicted a “sanitized, complacent view of Italian normalities”, at the same time revealing “the inner conditions and disturbances of normality: its cosmetic fakery, sexual innuendo, commodified leisure, deluded sense of affluence, and rigid conformism”. [Whitney Davis, “How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age” in October Magazine, Summer 2006, no. 117, pp. 71-98.]
His large-scale color images have been exhibited worldwide in important museums and foundations including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, (Madrid), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Centre Pompidou (Paris), National d’Art Moderne (Paris), Museo Luigi Pecci (Prato), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver).
He has done different editorial commissions for leading publications including New York Times, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast, National Geographic, Vogue Italia, Wallpaper, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, as well as several commercial collaborations with renowned brands like Vilebrequin, Champagne Taittinger, Fontana Milano 1915, HeavenSake, EDRA.
He now lives and works in Lucca, Italy.
1994 Begins the Beaches Series
1993 Starts working on large format photography
1989 Director of Photography in Fiction and Advertising Films
1979 Free-lance Photojournalist
1964 London College of Printing, England
1944 Born in Como