Franco Fontana

Franco Fontana is considered one of the greatest contemporary photographers. Born in Modena in 1933, where he currently lives and works, he approaches photography in the sixties attending the amateur circles of Modena. In 1963 he exhibited at the Biennale del Colore in Vienna and in 1968 his first personal exhibition in Modena; in 2006 the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic of Turin awarded him an honorary degree for his career. His photography has often been associated with painting, particularly modernist and abstractionist painting, an approach that contributed to a radical renewal of the concept of photography in the second half of the twentieth century. His works are part of important international museum collections including Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; International Museum of Photography, Rochester, NY; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, Paris; Victoria & Albert Museum, London. For Lazy Dog he published Invisible in 2022, a collection of never seen before photographs from 1959 to 2019.

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    Skyline

    € 35,00

    In 1978, Franco Fontana’s book Skyline helped pave the way for the new Italian photography with its radicalism and typically photographic approach. This book, made in a very simple way, without excessive graphic pretensions, presenting one photograph per page, was the culmination of a work in full maturity, freed from all the tics in vogue in photographic circles, advertising or conventional photojournalism.

    Skyline praised no city, no local production, it was a work closed in on itself. Starting from tangible reality, in this case the landscape, and from horizon lines, he excluded all superfluous elements to preserve the essential, the exaltation of forms and colors. Fontana codified his familiar landscapes and unknown expanses in such a way that signs, space, form, and color became the only elements of the image.

    With Skyline, before Luigi Ghirri’s famous book Kodachrome and six years before Viaggio in Italia, Franco Fontana was one of the first to question the linguistic possibilities of the chromatic process and the aesthetic characteristics of photography, personally reinterpreting the world around him while initiating a new reading of the Italian landscape. 

    This book is based on the original Italian edition and soft cover, both in format and presentation and in the number of photographs as set by Paola and Luigi Ghirri. To improve quality, the photogravure has been redone from the slides.

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    Photographs by Franco Fontana
    Text by Helmut Gernsheim
    Book design Paola Bergonzoni and Luigi Ghirri

    21 × 27 cm
    80 pages
    Paperback
    Italian/English
    Isbn 978-88-98030-63-7
    First published September 2023

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    Invisible

    € 58,00

    Photography is an act of self-awareness towards oneself and one’s cultural background. In his sixty-year career Franco Fontana has photographed what cannot be seen, succeeding in fixing through framing an ‘other’ image that is abstracted from reality, free from the portrayed subject. Geometry, proportions and composition have allowed him to reach, by progressive degrees, a conceptual synthesis that has been translated into linguistic unity and its formal manifestation, images. 

    Today, the crisis of the liquid society opens to the author the opportunity to explore new territories of the invisible ‘naked eye’, expanding the visual horizon and the iconographic structure while maintaining stylistic coherence and identity. If unity originates from the hybridization of differences, from the affirmation of unity itself originate the differences, in a system in constant balance between conceptual and formal, invisible and visible.

    Invisible, a 168-page book with more than 100 photographs, is the restitution of meticulous archival research from which many previously unpublished shots have emerged: from the most experimental research to more intimate evidence of expressive freedom, which constitute the fertile ground from which grew the unmistakable style that has made Franco Fontana internationally famous.

    Dedicated to those who know or approach the expressive path of the author, to those who want to explore that inner space, beyond reality, which belongs to the subjective interpretation, where you go in search of the image that is not yet there and that only the sensitivity of the photographer’s eye can capture and translate into a unique and unrepeatable shot. Thus, suddenly, the invisible becomes visible.

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    Photographs by Franco Fontana
    Editing by Lorenzo Respi
    Book design Bunker

    22 × 27 cm
    168 pages
    Hardcover
    English
    Isbn 978-88-98030-58-3
    First published November 2022

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