Francesco Zizola
Winner of the 1996 World Press Photo of the Year, Francesco Zizola has documented the world's major conflicts and their hidden crises, focusing on the social and humanitarian issues that define life, receiving numerous awards, including ten World Press Photo and six Picture of the Year International. With "Mare Omnis," where nets used for tuna fishing photographed by a drone seem to depict archaic graffiti and distant constellations, Zizola confronts us with the question of what we really look at when we see an image and, through photography, opens up new possible understandings of the complexity of reality. Who are you. I am Francesco and for more than 40 years I have used photography to learn about the world and myself. In the first three decades I wanted to know the physical and cultural boundaries of our planet by traveling away from Italy and the culture that spawned me. I became a witness to the truth of others' pain because I sought the truth of my own pain. I have probably recognized the pain of others because I have felt my own. The need to talk about the world of the innocent and the last was born before I decided to take the camera in my hand. I then realized that with photography I could tell something that people normally do not see. Reality in my eyes takes on symbolic contours because I discover among its layers something that corresponds to me and thus becomes a shared reality. I spent the first thirty years with photography capturing the world I was immersing myself in by traveling within and beyond known boundaries. And then? Then I discovered that I like the sea, that I like poetry, that my gaze could continue to discover something that starts from the surface but continues…