“The image is less important than the concept and the feeling it evokes. The main thing is to communicate it, to share it by any means.”
~ Franco Fontana (b. 1933)
A pioneer of color, Franco Fontana spent nearly six decades to capture natural landscapes, distilling them into striking geometric compositions reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist paintings that emerged in the US during the 1950s.
Born in Modena, Italy in 1933, Fontana began experimenting with photography in his early 30s as a means to ‘express the emotions he felt while observing the world around him.’ With an instinctive feel for color as a powerful means of expression, he laid the groundwork for his photographic practice in the early 1960s, more than a decade before color photography came into vogue. Drawing inspiration from Abstract Expressionist artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, he embraced minimalism and color, which became the visual language for which he was renowned.
In 1978 he published his debut book, Skyline, to widespread acclaim, and over the ensuing decades would go on to photograph rural and urban landscapes across the world in images that are among the most compelling in our time. Fontana has since published more than 100 books and received numerous awards and accolades, yet remains the same enigmatic visionary as ever. When asked about the evolution of his practice, his reply was a cryptic one, “To quote a phrase from the Prince of Salina in ‘The Leopard’: ‘everything changes to remain what it is’.” Now 91, Fontana’s photographs are in major collections all over the world, including the V&A in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Representative Works
This image, simply titled Puglia, 1978 is representative of Fontana’s approach to landscape photography. The landscape of Puglia in southern Italy consists mainly of agricultural land, sprawled across a rolling countryside that is unremarkable to most people who simply drive through it on their way to someplace more spectacular. Yet, Fontana was attracted to Puglia precisely because of its spartan landscape; its wide-open spaces, with few trees, telegraph wires or roads to break the rhythm made it the perfect place to focus on the essential shapes and patterns of the land.
Puglia, 1978 is a minimalist image of sky, clouds and a field of golden crops. To capture this scene (no edit or patch tool was used), Fontana would have to wait for the two clouds to fall in line at centre of the picture, one directly above the other, and for the light to cast the distant sliver of hill into a thin line of shadow. And the sky has to be bluer than blue, unblemished save for the two clouds. Finally, to add contrast, the crop field has to be a canvas of bright yellow, captured in soft focus to project the field like it was a block of one color, reminiscent of the color fields of a Rothko painting. It is the “purity” of such images that Fontana sought, and that marks his works from those of other photographers.
