Massimo Vitali (born in 1944 in Como, Italy) is an Italian photographer based in Lucca, Italy, and in Berlin, Germany. He studied photography at the London College of Printing. Massimo Vitali initially worked as a photojournalist for the Report Agency in the 1970s, and later as a movie camera operator.
In 1995 he took on fine art photography, often standing on a podium, and using large-format film cameras to capture high-resolution details over a broad expanse in locations such as beaches, clubs and public spaces.
His series of Italian beach panoramas began in the light of drastic political changes in Italy. Massimo started to observe his fellow countrymen very carefully. He depicted a “sanitized, complacent view of Italian normalities”, at the same time revealing “the inner conditions and disturbances of normality: its cosmetic fakery, sexual innuendo, commodified leisure, deluded sense of affluence, and rigid conformism”.
His work is collected in the world's major museums, including the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the Fond National Art Contemporaine in Paris, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Museo Luigi Pecci in Prato.
