Franco Fontana was born in 1933 inModena. He started taking photographs in the 1950s when he was working as a decorator in a furniture showroom.[1] In 1961 he joined a local amateur club in Modena. The experience would be a turning point in his career, and Fontana went on to have his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Società Fotografica Subalpina, Turin[1] and at the Galleria della Sala di Cultura in Modena in 1968. Since then he has participated in more than 400 group and solo exhibitions.[2]
Fontana's first book,Skyline, was published in 1978 in France byContrejour and in Italy by Punto e Virgola with a text byHelmut Gernsheim.
Fontana is the art director of the Toscana Fotofestival.[3]
He has received numerous awards, such as the 1989 Tokyo Photographer Society of Japan - The 150 Years of Photography - Photographer Award.[citation needed]
Fontana is especially interested in the interplay of colors.[4] His early innovations in color photography in the 1960s were stylistically disruptive. According to art critic Giuliana Scimé, Fontana "destroyed all the structures, practices, and technical choices within the Italian tradition."[5][6] Fontana uses35mm cameras, and as noted by Iwan Zahar, deploys distant viewpoints with telephoto lenses to flatten contours in a landscape of crops and fields into bands of intense, saturated colour.[7] This is an effect that Franco Lefèvre has described as 'dialectical landscapism'.[1] Of his use of colour in his 2019 retrospective exhibitionSintesi ('Synthesis') at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, curator Diana Baldon has observed;
“His bold geometric compositions are characterised by shimmering colours, level perspectives and a geometric-formalist and minimal language...By adopting this approach during the 1960s, Fontana injected a new vitality into the field of creative colour photography for then multicolour was not in fashion in art photography...The way Fontana shoots, dematerialises the objects photographed, which loose three-dimensionality and realism to become part of an abstract drawing”.[8]
Aside from the rural landscape Fontana has applied his graphic sensibility to other subjects: city architecture, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude.
Fontana's photographs have also been used as album cover art for records produced by theECM Records jazz label.
^abcColombo, Cesare., Bignardi, Irene, Zannier, Italo, and Fratelli Alinari. Museo Di Storia Della Fotografia. Italy, the One and Only : A Century of Photography, 1900-2000 / Curated by Cesare Colombo ; Texts, Irene Bignardi, Cesare Colombo, Italo Zannier ; with the Collaboration of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Central Office of Cultural Affairs. Firenze: Alinari, 1998. Print.
^Scimé, G., & Dau, M. (1997). Notes on Italian Photography: Part II: From Futurism to the Present. On Paper, 1(4), 32-35.
^Duddy, N. (1991). A View on landscape photography. Doctoral dissertation, Bloemfontein: Central University of Technology, Free State.
^Zahar, I. (2015). Photo Exemplar Classification: The Integration of Photographic History into Photographic Technique. In International Colloquium of Art and Design Education Research (i-CADER 2014) (pp. 161-172). Springer, Singapore.
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