Tennessee Williams, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Mimmo Rotella; Sofia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti, and Michelangelo Antonioni; Anita Ekberg, Luchino Visconti, Alberto Moravia, and Claudia Cardinale. At first glance, these icons may appear disparate, but they share something in common - they were all immortalized through the lens of Paolo Di Paolo.
The Italian photographer, whose captured the essence of an era, died at the age of 98 on Monday, in his birthplace of Larino, in the central region of Molise.
Born in 1925, Di Paolo moved to Rome, where he thrived as a reportage photographer. He worked for weekly publication Il Mondo, where, for 14 years, he contributed nearly 600 evocative images depicting Italy and the rest of the world.
With his compact Leica III C camera Di Paolo shot flm stars, writers, artists, nobility, and ordinary people. His artistic pursuits extended beyond Il Mondo, encompassing collaborations with various media outlets and personal projects.
However, as times changed and society's fascination turned to the allure of gossip and scandal, Di Paolo bid farewell to photography to return to his philosophical studies and publishing, launching a collaboration with the Carabinieri and curating for them 20 books and 43 calendars.
With his black and white images, Di Paolo chronicled the post-war years - an era marked by Italy's emergence from the ashes of World War II. His early images captured the contrast between traditions and modernity, showcasing women in Campobasso draped in conservative attire, their heads adorned with scarves, juxtaposed to young women in Viareggio sporting shorts.
Di Paolo's lens ventured far beyond Italy's borders, as he did reportages from Japan, Iran, and New York. He documented historical events, such as the funeral of Palmiro Togliatti, and took timeless portraits of iconic artists, intellectuals, painters, poets, writers, and film stars. His subjects were immortalized in unconventional angles and poses, revealing their essence with unassuming authenticity.
From Brigitte Bardot to Gina Lollobrigida portrayed with artist Giorgio De Chirico, from director Federico Fellini to Oriana Fallaci, Di Paolo's lens transcended the boundaries between disciplines. He also shot fashion pictures with an arty twist, in collaboration with journalist Irene Brin at Harper's Bazaar.
In a memorable encounter, Anna Magnani invited him to her villa in San Felice Circeo, near Rome, in 1955. Within those intimate walls, Di Paolo captured a series of portraits that exposed a rare vulnerability with Magnani lying in the sun or relaxing with her son.
One of Di Paolo's most significant collaborations unfolded with Pier Paolo Pasolini. Di Paolo's lens immortalized Pasolini at the Monte dei Cocci in Rome, beside Gramsci's tomb in the Non-Catholic Cemetery, and at Pasolini's house, with the writer’s beloved mother.
The photographer also gained exclusive access to the set of Pasolini's "The Gospel According to Matthew".
Pasolini trusted Di Paolo because he wasn't a paparazzo: the two had met during an unexpected partnership in 1959 when Di Paolo and Pasolini embarked on an extraordinary project - a travelling reportage on Italian vacations entitled "La Lunga Strada di Sabbia" (The Long Road of Sand).
The reportage foreshadowed Italy's rebirth in the '60s - the "boom years" - anticipating the investigative yet light format of Pasolini's groundbreaking travelling documentary "Comizi d'amore."
Published across three issues of the magazine Successo, the reportage presented images suspended between a hedonistic present and a mythical past.
Images went from the unpretentious photographs of young men drying and combing their hair in Pozzuoli after a swim, to the trendy young women portrayed on the Forte dei Marmi beach in fashionable sarongs.
There is a poetical tenderness instead in the image of the family photographed staring at the sea on the Rimini beach for the first time. From their pose you can easily realise that, in front of the infinite shimmering sea, they are feeling a mix of contrasting emotions, of apprehension, fear and elation.
This image reminds us that, amidst the stars, writers, and directors, Di Paolo's lens also sought beauty in ordinary, anonymous individuals engaged in the simplest of acts and captured poignant moments of everyday life, like the couple in front of Milan's Duomo feeding the pigeons and getting their picture taken by a photographer, a memento to show off with their friends if this was a rare trip to Milan or maybe an image to send back home if they had left their village in search of better economic or educational opportunities.
Yet, there was more behind Paolo Di Paolo's work and, while he imbued his photographs with a human touch, he often infused them with subtle humor and passion for architecture in a playful way.
Di Paolo's mastery transformed lights and shadows, turning urban elements into architectural geometries, immortalizing banal features like a pedestrian subway as a futuristic portal from a distant cosmos.
Between 1956 and 1962, he unveiled the soul of Milan, celebrating its iconic landmarks: he took a cinematic shot of the rooftop of the Duomo, reminiscent of the camera frames in Visconti's "Rocco and His Brothers", but also fun portraits like the one of Lilli Cerasoli and Edi Valdaneri with their faces framed by the elaborate decorative elements of the Duomo.
For Di Paolo, the pursuit went beyond the superficial allure of paparazzi-style snapshots: he aspired indeed to create a narrative within his images and each frame aimed at informing the viewers, to tell them a story and evoke an emotional response.
In recent years, Paolo Di Paolo's legacy was rediscovered, casting a well-deserved spotlight on his contribution to the realm of photography: in 2019, Rome's MAXXI museum unveiled a landmark exhibition titled "Mondo perduto" (Lost World), exclusively dedicated to Di Paolo's work. Sponsored by Gucci, the exhibition served as a visual chronicle, curated from a selection of 250 rarely seen images captured between 1954 and 1968. These evocative frames also inspired Alessandro Michele, former Creative Director at Gucci.
In 2020, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Valentino's creative director, invited Di Paolo to the brand's Haute Couture S/S 2020 show in Paris. The invitation celebrated Di Paolo's seminal reportage documenting Valentino's 1967 Haute Couture show in Capri.
The photographer was also the subject of a documentary directed by Bruce Weber, who discovered Di Paolo's work during a visit to Rome. Entitled "The Treasure of His Youth: the Photographs of Paolo Di Paolo," the documentary premiered at the 2021 Rome Film Festival. Besides, last month, on the occasion of his 98th birthday, Di Paolo received an honorary doctorate in art history from Rome's La Sapienza University.
Di Paolo is survived by his daughter Silvia who continues promoting his work through his archive. A testament to her father's enduring impact on the world of photography, the archive contains 250,000 negatives, contact sheets, prints, and slides, that were found in the cellar of Di Paolo's family house twenty years ago.
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