Marco Russo

Biography

Marco Russo (b. 1981) is a photographer from Florence, Italy.

Ever since he was a boy, photography has been his passion, almost as if the camera were an essential part of seeing. There is a clear distinction in his work between “seeing” and “looking” which in everyday life, and for almost all of us, remains implicit and occult.

In his photographs, Marco Russo “sees”. He refuses the overly facile and predictable vulgate of the digital camera and the way some contemporary artists use the photo as something halfway between personal diary or, at times, as documentation of something that happened with which their work is made to coincide. He rediscovers a more classic and discriminating valence of black and white (rarely colour, which does however also exist in his photographic studies), occasionally highlighted with unexpected touches of colour to stress a salient point or some special connotation of an object.

His masters seem to have been the great photographers, such as Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank. The moment is always “captured”, almost caught as a surprise as it happens. It is however picked up by the young photographer, who may have been courting the moment at great length, waiting patiently for something that takes place in a split second, when the shutter in its instantaneous click momentarily blinds the camera’s eye. The results are images that are ironic, but also tender and full of affectionate attention, part of a world still capable of inventing itself and of giving moments full of beauty and charm.

In 2010, after working in the fields of cinema, art and fashion, he had his first exhibitions in fine art galleries, abroad as well as in Italy.

His work is in the permanent collection of the Alinari Museum in Florence.