MASSIMO VITALI

INsight Artist, 2011

“Massimo Vitali depicts a sanitized, complacent view of Italian normality, at the same time revealing the inner conditions and disturbances of normality: its cosmetic fakery, sexual innuendo, commoditized leisure, deluded sense of affluence, and rigid conformism.”
—Whitney Davis

Massimo Vitali was born in Como, Italy in 1944. He moved to London after high school, where he studied photography at the London College of Printing. In the early 60s, Vitali started working as a photojournalist, collaborating with many magazines and agencies in Italy and Europe. It was during this time that he met Simon Guttman, the founder of the agency Report, who was to become fundamental in Massimo’s growth as a “Concerned Photographer.” In 1995 he commenced the Beach Series, illuminating the apotheosis of the Herd, expressing and commenting through the most intriguing, palpable forms of contemporary art—Photography. He lives and works in Lucca, Italy, and in Berlin, Germany.