Born 1984 in Milan, Francesco lives between Italy and the United States. He graduated at The International Center of Photography receiving the New York Times Foundation Scholarship in 2010. His work focuses on social issues and ongoing changes involving the western society, from Europe to the United States of America. In 2012 he started a long term documentation about the consequences of the Greek economical crisis, that led him to receive the Chris Hondros Fellowship Fund in 2013 and the Visura Grant for Outstanding Personal Project in 2016. A selection of his work was screened at Visa Pour L'image 2013/2015/2016 in Perpignan, at Image Singuliere 2014 in Sete, at les rencontre d'Arles 2014 and exhibited at 2014 and 2018 Lumix Festival for young photojournalism in Hannover and at 2015 Festival della Fotografia Etica in Lodi. Francesco is among the 2014 Leica Oskar Barnack finalists. His work appeared on The Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Liberation, Bloomberg businesweek, NEON, Courrier International, LFI, Internazionale, L'Espresso, Sette, Sportweek, Amica International, IoDonna among others. Since 2017 he’s focusing on changes investing contemporary American society, with particular attention to identity related issues in border areas. Since 2011 Francesco is represented by Contrasto.

Raised in the art world, he opened the Ca 'Di Fra' Gallery in Milan in 1997 with his father and sisters. In 2009 in Milan, with Vincenzo Maccarone, he founded the mc2gallery of which he is Art Director. Curator and private consultant for collectors, he is a talent scout for young photographers and organizes exhibitions of young Italian and foreign photographers of international renown - such as Antoine D'Agata, Jacob Aue Sobol, Michael Ackerman - in public spaces, photography festivals, italian galleries and international photography centers. He is Folio Reviewer in photography festivals such as the Vogue Photo Festival in Milan, the PhotoLux Festival in Lucca or Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, The European Photographic Festival in Busto Arsizio and Les Rencontres d'Arles in France. In 2016 he founded Periscope Photoscouting, an online consulting platform for emerging photographers or artists who use the photographic medium.

He works on long term independent project using photography and video. Member of VII photo Agency in NYC, he has devoted himself to the study of social issues, exploring the relation between power and individuals, to give voice to the fragility of human nature. Over the course of his career, he has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kashmir, Palestine, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, Colombia, Somalia, Southern Sudan , Egypt, Lybia and Syria. He was based in Iraq from January 2003 (three months prior to the invasion of Baghdad) until the end of 2008 as a contributor to Time Magazine. His works have brought him numerous awards. He regularly contributes for leading publications all over the world, and his projects have been presented as installations, exhibitions and screenings at festivals and galleries worldwide He is engaged with educational activities, regularly lecturing at universities and teaching workshops internationally. In 2012 Franco’s film for MSF was nominated for an Emmy Award together with other VII photographers. A Documentary regarding his work in Iraq, Shooting War, was screened in April 2017 at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC.

Graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna. Since 2000, through photography and video, her research has been moving on a fine line between imagination and reality, where the subject always establishes a relation with the natural elements and, at the same time, attempts to transcend the limits of the body and the mind. She often uses scale models to recreate real or imaginary places, which are then illuminated and photographed in her studio (as in the project The cities of thought). In recent years her research has focused on exploring the Italian landscape, with the publication of The third Venice and Atlas Italiae. Alongside the artistic career, she has dedicated her time also to the education activity and, for the past ten years, she has been leading the Conversation around photography, a series of talks with photographers and critics about contemporary photography.

A former journalist, Philippe Séclier has a passion for photography in all its forms. Art director for the daily Le Parisien in 2000, he became a freelancer in 2001 and published four books: Hôtel Puerto (2001), a long analysis on worldwide harbours, La longue route de sable (2005), following in the footsteps of the author and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, El camino de Tulahuèn (2014), following in the footsteps of the Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain and La jeune fille à la fleur (2017), a study on the famous photography of the French photographer Marc Riboud. He was director of two documentaries: one dedicated to Marc Riboud (2004), Instants d'année; the second, Un voyage américain (2009), inspired by Robert Frank’s book The Americans. He took part in the 60th anniversary of Magnum Photos in 2007 and has collaborated with the French photographer and director Raymond Depardon for fifteen years. He is also a curator: Autophoto was presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris in 2017 and Depardon USA at the Rencontres internationales de la Photographie d'Arles in Summer 2018.

Academically trained as sinologist and professionally as photographer, he is an artist and author. He runs the publishing house Rorhof with his brother Michele, regularly teaches about photography and his art practice and occasionally curates exhibitions. He studied Oriental languages in Venice and Beijing and completed several international internships, scholarships and residencies, including in institutions such as Magnum Photos (Paris, 2007), Fabrica (Treviso, 2008), Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation (Venezia, 2009) and Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2018). His work has been extensively exhibited in galleries and museums, while his books were awarded numerous prizes, such as at the Author Book Award (2014) and the Historical Book Award (2018) in Arles, the First Book Award at Paris Photo (2014), Gold at the German Photobooks (2014) and the Premio Bastianelli in Rome (2018).

She is an American-born curator and writer based in Paris who has been working at at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris for the past fifteen years. There, she has curated or produced exhibitions on a wide ranger of artists and photographers including Bruce Davidson, Jacques Henri Lartigue, William Klein, Jim Dine, Bernard Plossu, David Lynch, Martin Parr, Elliott Erwitt, Irving Penn, Sarah Moon and Don McCullin; as well as conserving the museum’s collection of artists’ videos. She is also an art writer who has been the longtime Paris correspondent for ARTnews magazine and has also written on photography and contemporary art for catalogs and magazines such as Art & Auction, Arts, frieze, Metropolis, Connaissance des arts, artpress and Art in Print.

Bossan has been managing complex editorial projects for years, discovering young talents and guiding them in creative research. A photoreporter, his works have been published on top international magazines. He is the author of about ten photography books (among which are Pechino-Parigi, sulla strada con l’Italia, 1989; Exit, 1992 with Roberto Koch; Esodo, 2000, on terminally ill AIDS patients; èAfrica, 2003). Exhibition organiser and curator, in 2011 in New York he directed the Festival Hope Between Dream and Reality with Elisabeth Biondi. He has been a communication consultant of Medici con l’Africa Cuamm since 1998. Member of the faculty of Fabrica as head of the Department of Photography since 2005, since 2006 he is the editor in chief of Colors magazine and since January 2014 he has been in charge of the Editorial area. For Fabrica he has designed the FFF award, curated the exhibition 6x6 Women, staged a performance with the installation of Erik Ravelo’s Peace Dove in Tripoli. Since 2014 he has edited a series of books for Fabrica, as well as the multimedia projects Sciabica and Lok Sabha. He is also the editor of the collection of books Up to now, Fabrica Photography. Project leader of Imago Mundi and of the new exhibition space Gallerie delle Prigioni in Treviso, he has been a professor of Photography at the University of Padua and in various Master’s courses.

Professional full-time photographer since 2010, he focuses his work on the balances of power in the Middle East in the wake of western intervention, as well as its consequences on the civilian population. He has followed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Yemen’s rapid decline in 2010 and the Arab Spring. His first works were published by Time, L’Espresso, and Internazionale. 
In 2011, he joined Contrasto, a major Italian photographic agency. In 2015, he became a nominee member of Magnum Photos. He lived in the Middle East from 2012 to 2014, dedicating himself to long-term projects regarding the aftermath of the fall of Gaddafi in Libya, the conflict in Syria, and its spillover into Lebanon. Since 2014 he has covered the war against the Islamic State in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. His work has been exhibited in Italian and international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Visa pour L’Image, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Boutographies and Fotoleggendo; and it has been featured in prominent international publications such as The Telegraph, Time, Le Figaro, Vanity Fair, Internazionale, L’Espresso, la Repubblica.

Class of 1966, Erik Kessels was born in the Dutch town of Roermond, near the Belgian border. He started his career working as an illustrator with Ogilvy & Mather Eindhoven and attending evening classes at the Academy of Fine Arts, then continued at the Kuipers & Schouten and the Chiat/Day agencies, the latter in London. In 1996, he and his creative partner John Kramer founded the agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam, which now has a successful international reputation. In addition to his advertising profession, Kessels is passionate about photography, as a collector, curator, book publisher and magazine editor. His installation at the FOAM in Amsterdam made an unforgettable mark: invited to imagine an exhibition about the future of photography, he came up with the idea of materialising the horrendous flood of images that washes over us every day, showing a million images of all kinds and origins loaded onto Flickr in the course of just one day.

He entered a darkroom for the first time when he was 13. After a period as an assistant photographer, he started his professional activity as a freelance photoreporter. Driven by his interest in high-quality black and white printing he moved to London to gain a deeper experience collaborating with three labs, after which he decided to move to the U.S. to his master and mentor Dick Arentz and to Print Zone in New York. After ten years spent abroad to continue his studies and experience on old photographic techniques he returned to Milan, where he first worked for some laboratories and later founded his own studios-labs (Studio Vaiarelli-Zone Five and Silverprint) before joining a professional and highly qualified team to create photography projects for Fine Art. He keeps travelling between the UK and the U.S. for work to keep up to date.

After the Master in Professional Photography in 2001, he began his career as a photographer, realizing various advertising campaigns and catalogs. Since 2005 he becomes Adobe Certified Expert for Photoshop and he is part of AdobeGuru, the group of official experts in the field of Digital Imaging, performing throughout Italy software demonstration activities, seminars and various launches of Adobe products. He works as a digital photography teacher collaborating with some national associations and with various schools in Italy. As post-production he worked for three international advertising campaigns commissioned by the Contrasto agency for the brand "Jacob Cohen", working on the photos of Elliot Erwitt. He collaborates for the post production with the photographer Monica Silva, for works exhibited in September 2014 in Sao Paulo and for the EICMA 2016 advertising campaign. He edited the post-production of some images in the Red Bull Content Pool, shot by the photographer Mauro Puccini. With the same photographer he also collaborated in 2017 on the creation of a social campaign for ADIDAS.

After graduating in Philosophy in 2005 with a thesis in Aesthetics at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", he attended a course at the Roman School of Photography and began his work as a documentary photographer. The first projects focus on the issue of immigration in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières - Italy; later he directed his work towards a personal research, remaining always adherent to contemporary topics, and in 2015 he started a long-term project aimed at exploring the impact of new technologies on global society titled How far_stories from the Internet. Represented since 2013 by the Contrasto agency, his works have been exhibited in museums and published in major national and international magazines and websites. In 2017, an excerpt from the work How far_stories from the Internet has been awarded at the Sony World Photography Awards in the Contemporary Issue category.

Zoppellaro studied Photography in Milan from 1997 to 2000, and in 2003, after collaborating with the Department of Photography of Fabrica, he moved to England where he started shooting for various magazines and music labels. At the same time he carried out several personal projects, from social reportage (Irish Travellers, Kosovan Refugees, African Witch Hunters, Homeless People in Hackney, High-Security Prisons in North-Eastern Italy), to projects on local customs (Religious Ceremonies in Southern Italy, Sex Fair in Milan) and youth movements (European Rave Parties, Mexican Punk, Hip Hop Scene in Dakar). In October 2015 he inaugurated his solo exhibition Heroes? at the Outdoor Festival in Rome. In March 2016 he launched Scratches at the Traffic Gallery in Bergamo. In September 2017 he published his first book, Appleby, on Irish travellers, published by Contrasto. This project was showcased in Cortona On The Move in 2016 at Spazio Forma (2017), at the Portrait(s) Festival in Vichy (2018) and at the Traffic Gallery in Bergamo (2018). He has published his work on Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Sunday Times Magazine, Financial Times Weekend, El Pais Semanal, L’Espresso, D La Repubblica, Io Donna, GQ, Les Inrockuptibles, Mojo, NME, Sportweek, and Vanity Fair.

After studying philosophy in Pavia and in Strasbourg and some experiences in publishing, she became passionate about photography. She began his professional career in FNAC where she held the position of Manager of the Photographic Galleries in Italy, from 2000 to 2014. She organized, in particular, the great exhibition of the FNAC Collection in Italy and the launch of the "Attention Talent Photographic Fnac" Award. Since 2015 she works for Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in the prestigious headquarters in Milano as Manager of activities. Here she follows the organization of all projects aimed at the public of Forma: important photographic exhibitions (such as Vivian Maier, Robert Frank, Sebastião Salgado), meetings with authors, teaching, projections and special projects. She collaborates also with Contrasto, one of the most important publishers of books and publishing projects dedicated to photography. She has been a member of the jury in many photographic awards and portfolio review. Specialties: photography, management, logistics, customer relations, editing, marketing, production, public speaking, seminars, supervisory skills, writing.

After the degree in History of the English Theatre at Università degli Studi di Milano, she works in the Contemporary Art Department of Sotheby’s auction house. From 1998 until 2005 she is gallery director of Photology, in 2005 she starts collaborating with Contrasto Group, where she created the printroom dedicated to photography collecting, Contrasto Galleria, of which she is director as of today. She curated many photographic exhibitions, both of established and emerging artists, such as Mario Giacomelli, Sebastião Salgado, Irene Kung, Massimo Siragusa, Alessandro Imbriaco, Kenro Izu, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Piergiorgio Branzi, Elliott Erwitt, Alex Webb, Bill Armstrong, Janet Sternburg. With Contrasto Galleria she participates in the most important art fairs like Paris Photo, Photo London, Arte Fiera Bologna. She collaborates to the exhibiting program of Leica Galerie Milan and is a regular lecturer of portfolio at Fotografia Europea Reggio Emilia and Photolux Lucca festivals. Her approach to photography is focused on the collecting area, which has specific and peculiar parameters and criteria.

At a very young age, he started to focus on professional photography carrying out several reportage projects on social and international issues working with some of the world’s most important magazines such as Time, Newsweek, Life, Stern, Panorama, Sette, Espresso and others. In 1981 he published his first book, Augusto e gli altri (Mazzotta) dedicated to children with disabilities. Since 1984 and until the coup of 1991, he monitored the development of events in the Soviet Union, from Gorbachev’s rise to power to the collapse of the Communist regime. His work won the Kodak award in 1988 and was included in the book Istanti di Russia (Peliti, 1990) accompanied by a travelling exhibition. In 1991, with Gianni Berengo Gardin and Ferdinando Scianna he published In treno attraverso l'Italia (Peliti), in 1992 he co-wrote Exit with Enrico Bossan (Peliti). A work of some years on the Giro d'Italia was published by the Italian and international press and included in the book In Giro, (Contrasto, 1996), in 1998 he published Album. Fotografie dall'Italia (Contrasto). His photos were published in a portfolio on the top international magazines and were exhibited in several individual and collective exhibitions in various Italian and foreign museums. Many times member of the international panel of the World Press Photo and of the board of the Henri Cartier-Bresson award. In 1994 he founded the publishing house Contrasto and over the years, both in Italy and abroad, he has produced many important exhibitions on authors such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastião Salgado, Richard Avedon, James Nachtwey, Gianni Berengo Gardin, William Klein, Josef Koudelka, David Goldblatt, Ferdinando Scianna, Mimmo Jodice and many more. He edited the book Fotobox, which reached international success with over 100,000 copies sold worldwide, and the huge volume I of the series Grandi Fotografi, with monographs about twenty of the most important world photographers, published in five languages. Currently he is president of Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Milan, the most prestigious institution for communicating Photography in our country, with over 100 exhibitions set up in Italy and abroad.

Born in Bagheria, in Sicily, in 1943, Ferdinando Scianna enrolled in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Palermo, but did not complete his studies there. In 1963, he met Leonardo Sciascia, with whom, at the age of 21, he published the first of numerous books that they then wrote together, Feste religiose in Sicilia (Religious Festivals in Sicily), which won the Nadar Prize. He then moved to Milan, where in 1967 he started worked for the weekly magazine L’Europeo as a photoreporter, special correspondent and then regular correspondent in Paris, where he lived for ten years. Introduced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, he joined the Magnum agency in 1982. Since 1987, he has been alternating reportage with fashion and advertising photography, areas where he has gained international success. His most important books include I Siciliani (Paris, 1977), Kami (Milan, 1988), Le forme del Caos (Udine, 1988), Leonardo Sciascia (Milan, 1989), Marpessa (Milan, 1993), Altrove, reportage di moda (Milan, 1995), Viaggio a Lourdes (Milan, 1996) and Dormire, forse sognare (Udine, 1997).

Born in Milan in 1955 to Giuseppe Gastel and his wife Ida Visconti di Modrone, Giovanni Gastel is the youngest of seven children. In the seventies, he started a long period of apprenticeship, taking wedding photos, portraits and still life shots. His first important break came in 1975, when he started working with the auction house Christie’s, but the real change came in 1981, when his future agent Carla Ghiglieri introduced him to the fashion scene and he started working with Vogue Italia, Mondo Uomo and Donna magazines. Since then, he has worked with many of the world’s most prestigious fashion publications, both in Italy and abroad, especially in Paris. From 1996 to 1998, he was President of the Italian Association of Professional Photographers, which he now serves at as Honorary President. It was in 1997 that he achieved the pinnacle of artistic recognition, when the Milan Triennale organised a one-man show of his works curated by Germano Celant, featuring around 200 photographs, evidence of a long and prolific career. In 2002, in the framework of the event La Kore Oscar della Moda (Fashion Oscars), he was awarded the Oscar for Photography.