Romano Cagnoni
Born in Tuscany, Romano Cagnoni is one of the world’s great photographers in the reportage tradition, with a long succession of significant work that includes Biafra, Vietnam (the first photographer admitted into North Vietnam), Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan (the Russian invasion), Chechniya, Yugoslavia and Kosovo. He left Italy for London in 1958, where he worked with Simon Guttmann (founder of modern photojournalism with Robert Capa, Felix Mann, Kurt Hutton, Cartier-Bresson, et al), and has been published in all the major international magazines, including Life, The Sunday Times Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Observer Magazine, Der Spiegel, L’Express, Epoca, among many others.
He returned to his native Pietrasanta in 1986, the occasion being a Time-Life book assignment on Italy, and settled in this area of marble and sculptors, where he now lives in Monteggiori. It was while we were both working for Time-Life in London that I met Romano, and we have remained friends since. Notably, Romano has for the most part created and researched his own assignments, preferring to retain full control of his work when he has sold them to the top register of international magazines. He is the recipient of the USA Overseas Press Award, the German bronze medal Art Directors’ Club, many Italian Prizes and, most recently, this year the Werner Bischof Silver Flute. He has had 41 solo exhibitions, including Biafra at Trafalgar Square and Witness at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, in 1969 and 1971 respectively, and the retrospective Chiaroscuro in Milan from 2003 to 2004, as well as participating in 42 group exhibitions. In the spreads below, click on any photograph for an enlarged view…
 Catalogue for “Werner Bischof’s Prize” 2009 |
 Vukovar, 1991  Rome, 1959 |
 Bosnia, 1993  North Vietnam, 1965 |
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 Biafra, 1968 |
MF: Although you’ve been very active in the photojournalistic scene, doing stories for all the top magazines, your work obviously goes beyond news events photographed for their own sake.
RC: Photography, particularly in black and white, seems to me to be the most ideal, new and extraordinary form to bring into the foreground the affairs of men with all their individuality and contradictions. I think that the story of personae is the story of all the stories. To photograph world events allowed me to be present in situations where people were obliged to reveal themselves, therefore I could, in terms of content, avoid any rhetorical posed photography. Certainly in this visual process, I remembered “The golden section” and “the divine light”. Or I shall say the golden light and the Divine Section? Apologies for my references to the old masters. After all, though we live in the 21st century, a great number of modern painters like Mondrian used in their work these classical studies on visual proportions.
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 New Guinea, 1962 |
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 England, 1981 |
MF: You’ve done a large number of picture stories, all of them characterised by strong ideas, and a good many of them were initiated by you rather than coming from the magazines. That’s a much more independent approach than most photographers take, isn’t it?
RC: At times I’ve envied photographers who were assigned to important stories. They didn’t have to think of the idea to photograph, to obtain visas, book hotels, cars, airplanes, press accreditations, political clearances, buy films, etcetera. To finance and organise the whole thing was sometimes quite an effort. Once I returned to London with the completed story, it had to be sold. I remember The Sunday Times Magazine editor refused a story I had done in South America. Later, a new editor was appointed and he bought it. Self-financing stories sometimes have the advantage of good economic returns, when one manages to sell the same story to magazines in different countries.
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 Israel, 1973 |
