PINO SETTANNI

Was born in Grottaglie on 21st March 1949. After leaving school he waorked for Italsider in Taranto but he had already started meeting artists and painters. At the age of 16 he took the photograph of a colleague together with her little daughter: it is the first portrait that will soon be prized. Therefore he decided to move to Rome in 1973. He started collaborating with newspapers and his first report was published in “Il Mondo”. The wind of vanguard was blowing strongly and Settanni got to know the milieu of art: in 1975 he met Monique Gregory, who will soon become his wife, owner of an art gallery in via del Babuino. In the same year he published Voligrammi, a series of photographs born from a game of lines and from a geometric study about the flight of birds. Two years later he met Renato Guttuso: this gave birth to a photographic book about Sicily of the master (1977) and a long relationship, a union between 1978 and 1983 later well ordered in the Gattuso volume: everyday life photography (1984). In 1986 Settanni was in Paris for le Mois de la photo: once back in Rome he moved to the study in via Ripetta where he developed the idea of building a great photographic gallery. Portraits in black were born, 77 wonderful portraits of characters coming from the cultural and performing environment, from Moravia to Fellini, from Mastroianni to Lina Wertmüller, from Benigni to Troisi and Morricone, who consecrated his fame as a portraitist. He realized, for the Colombiadi, the portraits of Rita Levi Montalcini, Carlo Rubbia and Renzo Piano and created the Calendario Piaggio in 1993. The following year the photographic series inspired to Tarots was born, already pianted by Gattuso. 78 photographs of which 38 with real characters. (representing 22 Major Arcana and 16 Minor Arcana) and 40 Minor Arcana not represented and realized with little manikins. After that we had the series of the Zodiac, obtained from the Museum of Photography in Paris. La Maison Européenne de la Photographie assigned in 1995 the Alphabet of the French in Rome, the photographic interpretation of French jobs and characters in Rome. From 1998 to 2005 he photographed cities involved in wars such as Mostar, Sarajevo, and Kabul realizing institutional campaigns for the Major State of the Italian Army. In 2002 and 2003 he realized for Rai 3 the photographic documentaries. Kabul the invisible women and the Balkans, the looks, the memory, presented at the Festival In International Festival of Cinema in Locarno. From here a reflection about the condition of the peoples and in particular of the women’s condition. Fascinated by new technologies he re-read in an aesthetic key some images coming from Afghanistan. Several are the exhibitions, the prizes and the assignments of this great master who died on 31^st August 2010 working up to the very last day of his final work. Sud Simboli Sguardi (the South symbols and looks).