The Italian media announced yesterday that photographer Giovanni Gastel, 65, had died from Coronavirus at the special COVID-19 hospital at the Fiera Milano trade fair complex.
Born in Milan in 1955 from Giuseppe Gastel and Ida Visconti, Luchino Visconti's sister, he lived and worked between Milan and Paris.
Gastel developed a passion for photography as a young man and soon he started working for Mipel, the official magazine of the Italian association of skins and leather manufacturers. More collaborations followed and he switched his interest onto fashion when his photographs were published on Annabella, Vogue Italia, Mondo Uomo and Donna.
Gastel's career as a photographer developed while he worked with Mondo Uomo and Donna and he benefited from the approach of the magazine's founders, editor and entrepreneur Flavio Lucchini and journalist and art director Gisella Borioli.
The magazines hoped indeed to present an innovative vision of made in Italy fashion, promoting a new approach to collections that conceived garments and accessories as objects of design. Readers were therefore invited to go beyond mere clothes and understand how they were constructed and produced.
Gastel thrived at these two magazines also thanks to the collaborative environment he found at Mondo Uomo and Donna, with designers, art directors, stylists and graphic designers developing together a new vision for fashion.
Around this time Gastel started taking pictures in which he juxtaposed fashion, interior design and architecture: a model wearing a dress by Luciano Soprani posed next to a chair by Philippe Starck; Franco Moschino's whimsical designs were pictured next to a cartoonish stool by Javier Mariscal, while a dress by Versace was compared to a Las Vegas landscape.
He also took a picture of Cinzia Ruggeri's iconic "Homage to Lévi-Strauss" dress for the October 1983 issue of "Donna" juxtaposing it to Alessandro Mendini's 1974 "Monumentino da casa".
Gastel often focused on geometrical silhouettes to make comparisons with architecture and combined in his photographs new and old technologies, experimenting with collages and materials, using vintage cameras and Polaroid instant cameras, playing with colours and adding small imperfections to make the images look less polished.
He also experimented with the concept of still life in fashion, creating surreal and ironic images in which bags were turned into faces or he employed as models for the covers of Mondo Uomo mannequins with Arcimboldo-inspired faces made of assorted materials and objects such as shells or scarves.
This technique inspired his first solo exhibition, "Fashion in Still Life" at the Diaframma gallery in Milan (1986), but throughout his career his works were featured in various exhibitions.
A regular collaborator of magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Elle, and Vogue Gioiello, Gastel produced adverts for the fashion and leather industries and developed campaigns for brands and fashion houses such as Canali, Christian Dior, Ferré, Guerlain, Hogan, Krizia, Levi's, Swarovski, Tod's , Trussardi and Gianni Versace.
In 1997 the Triennale in Milan dedicated to Gastel an exhibition curated by Germano Celant and a more recent event, a photographic exhibition entitled "The People I Like", was organised at the Maxxi in Rome, and featured 200 portraits of Gastel's personal icons from the worlds of art, fashion, design music and politics, including Ettore Sottsass, Roberto Bolle, Monica Bellucci and Barack Obama.
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