“Most of us, taking a first look at Mr Massimo Vitali’s breathtaking photographs, might be forgiven for thinking that they’re rather beautiful. Shot with a large-format camera from 18ft of scaffolding, they typically feature the general public at leisure in resort or beach environments, each individual reduced to a speck against spectacular and often overwhelming natural scenery. The compositions are clever and pleasing. The colours are blissfully washed out. Often one key shade predominates – the white of the snow at a ski resort, the blue of the sea on a beach, which gives each image a cleansing, transcendental feeling. Beautiful, right?
Wrong. Well, at least, according to the man himself. “I hate beautiful pictures,” he says, when MR PORTER meets him at his home in Lucca, Italy, itself a rather – for want of a better word – beautiful Tuscan town, still surrounded by its original Renaissance-era city walls. Mr Vitali lives here in a deconsecrated 14th-century church, its vast interior repurposed for modern family life via a series of stand-alone internal structures and decorated with tastefully minimal Italian furniture – from an 18th-century linen closet to modernist daybeds and lurid armchairs. It’s beautiful too, really. But Mr Vitali is not in the business of beauty. It just seems to happen to him.”
[…]
Words by Adam Welch
First published in Mr Porter, The Journal, Issue 223. Continue reading the story here
