Massimo Vitali (born 1944 in Como, Italy, lives in Italy) started his career in the 1960s as a photographic journalist. Later he worked as a film cameraman before concentrating entirely on art photography. In the1990s he became internationally known for his large-scale photographs of Italian beaches, discos and other public spaces, showing anonymous Italians during their leisure pursuits. His ability to show masses of people in landscape surroundings with a balance of formal and narrative details have let his works been interpreted as a contemporary version of the genre of history and landscape paintings, reinterpreted through photography.

The Riccione Diptych in The UBS Art Collection is an important work from Vitali’s Beach series and was taken at the Adriatic seaside resort Riccione. With its birds-eye perspective - Vitali stands for his shots on platforms or ladders about five meters above the ground - it represents a beach scene with crowds of people and colorful striped deck-chairs in the foreground and with modern urban apartments and hotels in the background. The streamlined dynamic composition which is directed towards a light blue horizon, achieves its pictorial quality through corresponding formal elements, reiterated in the stripes of the deck-chairs, the regular stripe-like levels of the rectangular apartment buildings, and the rows of beach huts. Within the huge panorama, frozen in time, members of the crowd become visible as individuals whose appearance and behavior separate them from the anonymous mass, almost giving the feeling of a social statement or report. Presented with the aesthetic of light overall tone and a large-format presentation under a plexi surface, the images seem to merge into their surroundings.

Reference:

Massimo Vitali. Landscape with Figures, Steidl Publishers: Göttingen (Germany), 2004