Sometimes you’re just lucky… You follow a photograph auction and notice nobody is bidding on what clearly appears to be a picture of Italian photographer Massimo Vitali (1944). His iconic Italian beach scenes are almost as expensive and as famous as those red cars and normally change hands at noble auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Perhaps not surprising if you take into account that his photographs/diasec prints are at least 200 x 240 cm. and this particular one only 12 x 17 cm. My find turned out to be a signed proof of the maestro himself. Vitali started his series of Italian beach panorama’s in 1995 in an attempt to better understand his fellow countrymen. In his own words the depiction of 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.” Going to the beach in Italy will never be the same again.
Check: www.massimovitali.com
Massimo Vitali
