Pino Settanni Biography
Pino Settanni was born in Grottaglie in 1949. At just 16 years old, while working as a student worker at the Italsider in Taranto, he began to cultivate a passion for photography using a Russian-made Zenit camera. After graduating from high school and taking on roles as an employee, he opened a photography studio in Taranto, but soon oriented his art towards artistic expression and portraiture, documenting the first workers' demonstrations and the birth of trade unions in the newly industrialized area. His first award-winning portrait, "Ancient Sentiment," portrays a worker with a little girl in his arms.
The photographer and writer Giuseppe Alario convinces him to leave Taranto to express himself in the field of artistic photography and Settanni moves first to Turin, collaborating with UTET, then to Rome, where he faces difficult years, living in a pension and collaborating as a photojournalist for newspapers journalism, including Il Mondo. In 1975 he met the gallery owner Monique Gregori, who would become his wife, and published his first book, "Voligrams", in which he sought order in disorder through his photographic images. In 1977 he held his first photographic exhibition in Rome, starting the project "Dialogues on minimum systems", based on the recovery of the photographic defect.
In 1978 he met Renato Guttuso and proposed that he photographically reinterpret Sicily, which had inspired his paintings, in black and white. Settanni becomes his assistant and personal photographer, but the two have a conflictual relationship and, in 1983, Settanni resumes his full-time photography career, without ever giving up his concept of painting-photography.
In 1986 he went to Paris to participate in the Mois de la Photo with the project "Volo e Barocco". In 1992, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's feat, he created the portraits of Rita Levi Montalcini, Carlo Rubbia and Renzo Piano for the commission of the Presidency of the Council, and in the same year he created the 1993 Piaggio Calendar. In 1994 he created the series photographic "Tarocchi", inspired by the subjects portrayed by Guttuso, and the "Zodiac" project, purchased by the Museum of Photography in Paris.
From 1998 to 2005, Pino Settanni photographed cities affected by war such as Mostar, Sarajevo and Kabul, creating images for calendars and institutional campaigns commissioned by the General Staff of the Italian Army. In 2002 and 2003 he created for Rai 3 the photographic documentaries "Kabul le donne invisibili" and "Balcani, gli occhi, la memoria", presented at the Locarno International Film Festival. Many of these images are transformed through digital technology in a sort of aestheticization operation.
Throughout his career, Settanni has received financial support from Mamiya Trading, a company operating in the professional photography sector, which has allowed him to create exhibitions and catalogs independently of the contemporary market. Pino Settanni died in Rome on 31 August 2010, still in full swing.
