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For years, Italian photographer Massimo Vitali has been taking large format photos of the relaxation rituals that punctuate our lives. A native of Como, Vitali presently lives in Tuscany. He was born in 1944 and studied photography at the London College of Printing. A 1960s meeting with Simon Guttmann, the founder of the Report agency, prompted him to begin a career in photo journalism for Italian and European magazines. In the 1980s he worked as a filmmaker for television and cinema, and from the mid 1990s onwards, Vitali turned his attention to photography as a means for artistic research, shaping it into an original tool for portraying the world.

Many of Vitali’s photos show vacation destinations, applying a topographical clarity and a wealth of detail to the rites and rituals of modern leisure. His particular technique allows him to combine the minute detail of view-camera photography with a fascination for the fickle world of appearances, for his large-scale color images are shot from from a 12-to-15-foot platform.

Vitali says of both his process and his philosophy of photography:

The images must have a magical dimension in which perhaps sociology intermingles with play, and which have a story to tell. In the final analysis, I am happy when the ways of interpreting my pictures are complex and sometimes contradictory. A beach, where there are people playing in the water, with a factory in the background can be seen as a criticism of leisure-based society just as it can be seen as showing up the destruction of nature – mindlessness in the face of environmental issues. At the same time, the same image shows a contrasting set of notions: pleasure, games, bodies, loving relationships and the sickly sweet color of the water evoking the lost idea of beauty, or those ancient pictures in which bodies float like purgatory. I am so curious I let myself get pulled along to almost voyeurism. The way people behave fascinates me but I don’t try to understand what it’s all about. My part is neutral – all I do is take note of what comes to me. I am rigid because I take a stance and then I wait for things to come to pass in front of me. I am open because the image is defined by what happens. The experience of photography becomes an open practice for experiencing the world.