Giovanni Chiaramonte

The first major monograph on Giovanni Chiaramonte (1948-2023) produced in collaboration with the Giovanni Chiaramonte Archives.

This volume presents for the first time all the cycles of his photography, from the earliest and little-known works from the seventies and eighties to the most famous series on the Italian, European and American landscape, including the work on Central America, mostly unpublished and all awaiting discovery.
In his introductory essay, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle analyses Chiaramonte’s individual works in chronological order, from the conceptual period on, so presenting the complexity of the photographer’s work for the first time in a coherent way. Until now, the very rich bibliography on Chiaramonte has lacked a monographic and anthological work, which Quintavalle and the photographer had been planning for some time. The book includes an essay by Paolo Barbaro on Chiaramonte’s interest as a photographer in architecture, which certainly occupied an important space, although he cannot be described as an architectural photographer in the sense of having specialised in the field. Yet his work has had a significant weight in this segment of the history of the image.

The book presents a selection of more than 400 photographs by one of the finest and most extraordinary contemporary photographers, an intellectual with multiple interests, but also a beloved teacher and extraordinary militant critic, intent on discovering, proposing or re-proposing, through the publication of volumes that he edited himself, the most singular episodes in the culture of the image of the second half of the twentieth century. In this respect, some of his texts have been brought together in the volume, together with an anthology of writings about him, reproduced and coherently arranged.


The volume is part of the series of monographs Electaphoto, devoted to the best-known names in contemporary photography, but also to some who have unjustly remained in the shadows, unpublished, presented after careful studies. The series reconstructs, through a group of authors chosen to achieve an interdisciplinary approach, a cultural history of photography of the 20th and 21st centuries. These are books to read, as well as to look at and understand.