Franco Fontana

Franco Fontana is an Italian photographer born in Modena, on December, 9th, 1933. He is best known for his abstract colour landscapes. Fontana's photos have been used as album cover art for records produced by the ECM jazz label. He is known as the inventor of the photographic line referred to as concept of line.

His Style

Franco Fontana is above all interested in the interplay of colours and he had based his own vibrant and original language on that. The later critics had labeled it as Photographic Trans-avantgarde. He explored different subjects: urban landscape, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude. He worked with 35 mm cameras, mostly on location claiming that his studio was the world.

Brief history

He began working as an amateur photographer in 1961. His first personal exhibitions took place in 1963 in Vienna, in 1965 in Turin and in 1968 in Modena. Since then he has participated in more than 400 exhibitions - collective and personal - and his work is in approximately 60 museum collections all over the world. He has signed numerous advertising campaigns for different brands as Fiat, Volkswagen, Ferrovie dello Stato (National Italian Railways), Snam, Sony, Volvo, Versace, Canon, Kodak, Robe di Kappa, Swissair. He works with magazines as Time, Life, Vogue (USA and France), Venerdì di Repubblica, Panorama, and with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and New York Times newspapers.


His works have been published in more than 40 books in various editions and languages and are displayed in many private and public collections all over the world. HIs first book Skyline was published in 1978 in France by Contrejour and in Italy by Punto e Virgola with a text of Helmut Gernsheim.To name a few: MoMA, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo; National Gallery, Beijing; Australian National Gallery, Melbourne; GAM, Turin.

Currently he is the art director of the Toscana Fotofestival. Famous international photographers are invited.


He's got numerous awards, as the 1989 Tokyo Photographer Society of Japan - The 150 Years of Photography - Photographer Award.

Photography, writing with light is certainly still magic, one click leads through mysterious chemistry to develop and realize an image. But Fontana doesn't restrict himself to just the image, he transforms it to something else, probably curious about other people's life, about moments that are never his, panorama's presumable real but felt differently, dreams that were dreamt by other people somewhere one has not been. Like Elias Canetti wrote what could be the motive of every artist: "Nobody resists without a borrowed life, our own is not enough". There are landscapes in the mind that surpass those that casually could happen in front of our eyes and they are superior. They are made of so many of those things that we do not even know where and when and how: a book we read, or a song, the memory of a person or the wish to forget, an instant moment or a long run of years, Fontana, with his brilliant simplicity (apparent simplicity, as matters from the mind and from the heart appear in a complicate way) registers this and meanwhile gives space by suggesting to enable us to fill in with our own memories.from our times, with all our own fantasmagoria as everyone of us makes.

(Francesco Guccini)

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