Venezia, 1970

Franco Fontana was born in 1933 in Mondena. He started making photographs in the 1950s when he was working as a decorator in a furniture showroom. In 1961 he joined an amateur club which was a turning point in his career, and went on to exhibit solo in 1965 at the Società Fotografica Subalpina, Turin, and in 1968 in Modena, at the Galleria della Sala di Cultura.Fontana has photographed for advertising campaigns for brands such as Volkswagen, and has been a magazine photographer for publications. He has received numerous awards.Fontana is above all interested in the interplay of colours and he has based his own vibrant and original language on that. His early innovations in colour photography in the 1960s were stylistically disruptive, noted by critics to have "destroyed the schema, practices, and technical choices of the Italian tradition. Fontana uses 35mm cameras, and images distant viewpoints with telephoto lenses to flatten contours in a landscape of crops and fields into bands of intense, saturated colour.