Romano Cagnoni was born in Pietrasanta, Italy. He is internationally recognized as one of the most representative photographers of the twentieth century. It was Harold Evans, formerly editor of the Sunday Times, who included him among the greatest, in his book Pictures on a Page, along with Don McCullin, Eugene Smith and Cartier-Bresson.
He moved to London in 1958, where he remained for over thirty years, met Simon Guttmann, mentor to Robert Capa, with whom an intense collaboration was born. He photographed Harold Wilson’s electoral campaign and Winston Churchill’s funeral, was the first independent western photographer to be admitted to North Vietnam during the war along with James Cameron, and he convinced Ho Chi-Minh to be photographed and earn the cover of Life Magazine. Following the conflict in Biafra creating reportages that won him the prestigious Overseas Press Award.
Together with Graham Greene he documented Allende’s Chile, Peron’s return to Argentina, the conflict in Israel, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Poland, where he secretly photographed the unapproachable Red Army soldiers and again the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya and the Middle East.
With his photographs of wars and conflicts he narrates human conditions, through reports published in the newspapers of the most important magazines of the world, including: Life, Stern, Observer, Paris Match, Times, Newsweek, Sunday Times, Epoca and L’Expresso. During his career he has held 50 personal exhibitions, received several awards and published 16 books.
His narration of events is destined to irreversibly modify the order of the world – from the widely documented photojournalist – it becomes a succession of fragments capable of arousing amazement, when the point of view adopted moves the attention to the less obvious element, the most imperceptible, beyond the ordinary news chronicle. It is an innovative process that the photographer implements, communicating his own idea of reality and restoring it to a new unedited vision.
A continuous challenge perpetrated on the field: from work on North Vietnam (1965), as a single western photographer to be admitted to the territory , to the award-winning reports in Biafra (1968-1970), among the first correspondents to document the phenomenon of starving children, of the masses who lost their individuality, of the oppressed who tried to emerge as a people of resistance; and again from Chile before the Coup at the hands of Pinochet (1971), to Argentina during the return of Peron (1972), to the revolution in Romania (1989) or to daring and never experienced productions, such as the preparation of unlikely sets in the fields of combat, to portray the Chechen guerrillas or the use of the optical bench, to bring back the destruction of the conflict in every single detail in the territories of the former Yugoslavia.
“Going back over his work, it is clear how any choice results from a constantly evolving creative process, finalized to the production of new representations which, although moving from situations of upheavals and conflicts, subvert the habitual reports of the reportage – a genre to which it has always remained faithful – adding from time to time an unexpected element. A drive for reflection, a continuous tension, which is recognized as the capacity to know how to see beyond facts, which is enclosed in representations destined to remain “memorable” in history.”
Benedetta Donato
ROMANO CAGNONI was born 9 November 1935, in the small coastal town of Pietrasanta in Tuscany, Italy.
He passed away 30 January 2018.
Please visit Romano Cagnoni’s website for more of his great work: www.romanocagnoni.com
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