Romano Cagnoni part 4
MF: You spent many years living in London, as well as in Tuscany. Has each place affected the way you work?
RC: It was very exciting to arrive in London as a young man from a small Tuscan town near the sea. I had only one Leica. To buy more cameras and lenses that I needed, I did things like the following. I climbed down from the roof of the Dorchester hotel to the window of the apartment of Elisabeth Taylor and her husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, the photographs I took were bought by the Daily Express and used on a big spread. Was I already a photojournalist? Is a Daily Express staff photographer a photojournalist? I learned about journalism from Simon Guttmann, but my most important experience was through everyday life for many years with my departed first wife Berenice Sydney, whose beautiful paintings are in most British museum collections. Conversations with Berenice about visual approach to images were very important to my development as a photographer, beside the enormous quantity of work we helped each other to carry on.
 |
 Berenice Sydney, 1972 |
It was time to return to Tuscany. First, I had an assignment from Time-Life to make a book in Italy. Later I moved back to my old town of Pietrasanta on which I made a book commissioned by the local council. For a long time I had wanted to photograph the quarries and the quarrymen of nearby Carrara, The car company Fiat provided a quite good commission that permitted me to give a long time to the work, which resulted in the book Caro Marmo.
 |
  |
  |
I continued my international photojournalism from my new base of Pietrasanta, moving to different world places with my wife Patti.
 |
 Versilia, 1985  Pietrasanta, 1984 |
 Pietrasanta, 1986 |
Pietrasanta is a well-known working place for international sculptors. Henry Moore, Hans Arp, Marino Marini, Isamu Noguchi and many famous others worked here for many years. Meeting interesting people like them stimulated me to learn more about their art. For a while now I’ve been working on a book I titled Marble, The Material of Art. It will be published next year.
 |
 Marble Material of Art 1  Diptych Lucca San Michele |
 Marble Material of Art 2  Diptych Michelangelo |
A work in progress, large format plates Series: “The nature’s brush strokes” |
 |
Editions of Romano Cagnoni’s are available directly from his studio, at r.cagnoni@gmail.com For more on Romano, please see the following sites:- http://www.romanocagnoni.com Romano on Facebook
