(1968, Milán, Italy)
Paolo Ventura, is an Italian photographer dedicated above all to miniature photography. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and currently lives and works at NYC.
Ventura grew up in Milan with summers spent on the peaks of eastern Tuscany. His father, Piero Ventura, was the author of children’s books during the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1980s, Ventura attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.
In the early 1990s he began working as a fashion photographer. In a few years I was working with fashion magazines such as Elle, MarieClaire, Amica, Vogue Gioiello, among others.
In the late 1990s, ten years after his career, Ventura gradually left the world of fashion photography and moved to New York to pursue his personal artistic path. In her studio in Brooklyn, she began to build and photograph small dioramas about World War II in Italy, based on memories and stories from her grandmother.
In 2006 he published “War Souvenirs”, a collection of this work, with a foreword by the American writer Francine Prose. This work was followed by a series of exhibitions around the world. In fact, the BBC included Ventura’s works in the documentary on photography: “The genius of photography” (2007).
Three years later, he started his second great project: “Winter Stories” (2009), which became a book published by Aperture with a foreword by Eugenia Perry.
In that same period, he began working with different galleries in New York and in Europe, followed by exhibitions and acquisitions of museums and photographic institutions around the world. In 2010, the United States Library of Congress purchased a collection of 142 Polaroids from their “War Souvenirs” series, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts purchased a print of their “Winter Stories”.
In the following years he created other projects such as “The Automaton”, published by Dewi Lewis in 2012 and “Behind The Walls” by Danilo Montanari Editore.
In 2010 he returned to Italy, to Anghiari, a small town in Tuscany. There, in a former field study, he began working on his “Short Stories” project using his family as photographic subjects. In 2016, Aperture published a collection of this work in a book titled “Short Stories”.
In 2012, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO) presented a solo exhibition of Ventura’s work titled “Lo Zuavo Scomparso”. Punctum publishes a book with the same name.
Canadian filmmaker Helen Doyle included Ventura’s work in her 2013 film “An Ocean of Images.” In the same year, Swiss television dedicated a short documentary to Ventura’s work that was broadcast on Swiss national television.
In 2015, Dutch documentary filmmaker Erik Van Empel directed a full-length documentary about Ventura titled “Paolo Ventura: The Vanishing Man”, which won The Prix Italia in 2016 as the best film in the TV Performing Arts category .
In the same year, Ventura began his first collaboration in theater. Working with director Rob Ashford, he became aware of the set design for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. In 2016 Ventura continued his work in theater, collaborating with director Gabriele Lavia, to create the stage and costume design for Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera “Pagliacci” at the Teatro Regio in Turin.
Ventura visualizes situations and visions that no longer exist but that he would like to photograph, so he started building models by hand. Create miniature buildings and also create the characters in their traditional vintage costumes that he himself makes. It also creates the trees and all the components of the image. In the end, he manages to create stories full of magic.
Links
Some of his Photos
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