Massimo Vitali: Entering a New World. Photographs 2009–2018

Steidl is committed to publishing the ongoing life’s work of Massimo Vitali, and Entering a New World, collecting images from 2009 to 2018, is the newest book in this series.
This large-format volume is the latest in Steidl’s series publishing the life’s work of Massimo Vitali. Following the first two volumes, published together as Landscape with Figures / Natural Habitats, 1994–2009 in 2011 (and now out of print), Entering a New World presents Vitali’s large-scale color images of humans interacting en masse — both consciously and unconsciously — with their environments.

Whether relaxing beachside, exploring the ruins of the Roman Forum or navigating a crowded shopping promenade, the scenes in these photographs are topographical celebrations and subtle critiques of our changing habits of leisure. The book furthermore traces an important shift in Vitali’s practice: his move from large-format film to medium-format digital.

At the beginning of the Eighties, a growing mistrust in the belief that photography had an absolute capacity to reproduce the subtleties of reality led to a change in his career path. He began working as a cinematographer for television and cinema. However, his relationship with the still camera never ceased, and he eventually turned his attention back to “photography as a means for artistic research”.

His series of Italian beach panoramas began in the light of drastic political changes in Italy. Massimo started to observe his fellow countrymen very carefully. He depicted 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”. [Whitney Davis, “How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age” in October Magazine, Summer 2006, no.117, p.71-98.]

Over the past 12 years, he has developed a new approach to portraying the world, illuminating the apotheosis of the Herd, expressing and commenting through the most intriguing, palpable forms of contemporary art – Photography.
In 1995 he commenced the Beach Series.
He lives and works in Lucca, Italy, and in Berlin, Germany.