Franco Fontana

Franco Fontana is an Italian photographer born in Modena, Italy in 1933, best known for his abstract colour landscapes. Fontana's photos have been used as album cover art for records produced by the ECM jazz label.






Franco Fontana was above all interested in the interplay of colours and he explored different subjects: urban landscape, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude. He worked with 35 mm cameras, mostly on location claiming that his studio was the world.The later critics had labeled it as Photographic Trans-avantgarde.

He is known as the inventor of the photographic line referred to as concept of line He began working as an amateur photographer in 1961. His first personal exposition was in 1968 in Modena. Since then he has participated in more than 400 expositions - collective and personal - and his work is bought in approximately 60 museum collections all over the world.




Like Elias Canetti wrote what could be the motive of every artist: "Nobody resists without a borrowed life, our own is not enough". There are landscapes in the mind that surpass those that casually could happen in front of our eyes and they are superior. They are made of so many of those things that we do not even know where and when and how: a book we read, or a song, the memory of a person or the wish to forget, an instant moment or a long run of years, Fontana, with his brilliant simplicity (apparent simplicity, as matters from the mind and from the heart appear in a complicate way) registers this and meanwhile gives space by suggesting to enable us to fill in with our own memories.from our times, with all our own fantasmagoria as everyone of us makes.
(Francesco Guccini)


He has been signed for numerous publicity campaigns, as FIAT, VOLKSWAGEN, National Railways, VOLVO, VERSACE, CANON, KODAK, SNAM, STET, MONDRIAN, J.WALKER, ALITALIA, SWISSAIR, LA RINASCENTE. He works with TIME-LIFE, VOGUE USA, VOGUE FRANCE, VENDERDI DI REPUBBLICA, PANORAMA, FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE, EPOCA and many more distinguished publications.      

Photography, writing with light is certainly still magic, one click leads through mysterious cemistry to develop and realize an image. But Fontana doesn't restrict himself to just the image, he transforms it to something else, probably curious about other people's life, about moments that are never his, panorama's presumable real but felt differently, dreams that were dreamt by other people somewhere one has not been.

His work has been published in more than 40 books in various editions in Italian, Japanese, French, German, Swiss, English and Spanish. His numerous awards include the 1989 Tokyo Photographer Society of Japan - The 150 Years of Photography - Photographer Award.

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