LUCIA GIACANI

LUCIA GIACANI FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER

‘Lucia Giacani is a woman who immortalizes women under every aspect. Feelings, ambitions and normality are captured through the lens behind which is a feminine eye that knows what to look for and how to express the essence of an entire universe. A woman who reflects another woman: this is the intimate reason of her job. Her look – naturally feminine and revolutionary – is the silent engine that works behind every shot and through all her flashes.’ Vogue.it

Working from her studio in Milan, Lucia has over fifteen years of experience in fashion photography. Lucia moved to Milan with the intention of becoming a fashion photographer where she was able to quickly develop her style and technique by collaborating with various magazines and beginning a 5 year relationship with Franca Sozzani's Vogue Italia and Vogue Accessory.

A crucial part of Lucia’s working practice is the planning that goes into every shoot, an avid sketcher, she is meticulous in her preparation. Involving the team in the creative process and creating a pleasant working atmosphere is essential, Lucia believes, for the best results. Results that are perfected in her in-house post production work that 'take things to a whole new level' (Trendland, 22/08/2013).

EXTRACT FROM PERSONAL EXHIBITION 'SOGNI LUCIDI'

'The work of Lucia Giacani runs along the border between photography and tableaux vivants often slipping towards the latter for narrative depth, complexity and dramatic sense of theatre: there is a deep desire to go beyond the photographic image and present a before and after – narratively speaking – as a meta-communication that narrates what is behind the scene of the shooting and the lives of the subjects portrayed. In this sense, the work of Giacani is first of all a mise-en-scène: of fashion, natuarally, that not only turns everyday life into an ironic allegory but also of photography itself, in a kind of self-analysis of images that speak to the viewer; employing the tools that we usually use to transform our lives, tools, among which it is more necessary than ever to include ourselves, our bodies, our feelings and our gaze.

The photographic series Trends for Harrods Magazine embeds on a construction scaffold with a very British brick wall background a number of models posing in the same way in which thirty years ago the actors of the Living Theatre formed chessboards on the world stage: tableau vivant, in fact that through the surreal staging and the theatricality suggest something else apart from the superficial perception of our daily lives; DDR is a real production in stillness, reminiscent of tableaux vivant of the late nineteenth century, when it had been possible to tell a story with the simple juxtaposition of imagery that was instantaneously perceived as metaphor and at the same time dialogue. The female icons are gently plucked – as if delicately held between two fingers – by the artist directly from the streets of Milan – along which they turn so many heads – and deposited in burtonian contexts, embodying not beauty but the attitude of a restrained passion.

What is fascinating in the first place, however, is the ability of a fashion photographer to impregnate their own artistic vision into every work, not due to a technique or for sheer self indulgence, but a vision that is capable of undermining the limits that photography today imposes on itself. The images are charged with a slight ironic nostalgia, pain also, and a soul searching that connects these figures to the great protagonists of western figurative art – from Bernini’s statues of Madonna with child to Warhol’s Edie Sedgwick – and allows them to escape sequentially to the habitually turned pages of glossy magazines where so much beauty cancels itself out in the act of commercialising everything that comes to hand. Turned into mannequins, these wonderful women become closer to themselves, questioning the role assigned to them, playing with their very existence by posing in staged surreal mise-en-scène that finally gives them life beyond a mere aesthetic: Lucia Giacani built for them – and also for herself – a den of fiction, forcing them to act, and to be themselves in virtue of the fact that they are impersonating someone else. A miracle of theater and art, and, with certain artists like Giacani, photography.'

- Paolo Marasca
Regional Head of culture Ancona, Italy 

'An amazing Lucia Giacani at the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona. Jesina by birth, she lives in Milan and deals with photography since 1998.

A photographer of the most prestigious fashion magazines, with an intense national and international exhibition activity, she passed by in August in the spaces of Lazzaretto - where Giacomo Casanova also passed. Here they found their creatures temporary, halfway between the flowering girls of Proustian memory and evolved identity of the Silver Factory of Warhol. Giacani investigates the expressive potential, fixing them as if in a dreamy still from video. Not just a glossy advertising product but a thick exploration. In fact, the artist plays on paradoxical combinations. I quote as an example Under my skin (2013) and Clean inside (2014). In the first, which appeared in "Vogue", an alienating female figure appears in an algid laboratory of animal anatomy, even with a hairstyle that recalls striations of muscles. In the second, appeared in "Ten Project" by Fotolia, the model poses with her hand away from the dress but instead of showing the breast, we see a milky heart set in the rib cage. Tim Burton's dreamlike vision, which goes from pop color to pastel hues can also be seen, from the soft figures (Virgo for "Vogue accessory") to b-movies or burtonian Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory. How not to mention the perfect tableaux vivant of DDR, the intelligent and strict philological vision of espionage as in The lives of others by F. H. Donnersmarck. Like Empereur, which recalls the Napoleonic epic, DDR is inserted in the tendency of current art to measure itself against the past and historical memory.

Giacani impresses with the great care of the project and the execution, as well as the ability to interact in a complex team work. The same expression of the faces, the one that Pliny called argutiae vultus, reveals a care to the smallest detail, in which photographer and make-up artist come together in perfect harmony. The application, that is the careful and continuous study by the artist towards the executive procedure and the aesthetic aspect (as we observe in the meticulous arrangement of the subjects in pose), is therefore the result of an enviable and worthy mastering of the trade.

Nonetheless, the characteristic of the young artist from Jesi does not stop there. There is more. Those who have visited the exhibition have perceived not only an obvious technical and formal agility. Even fashion in its lightness and folly (perhaps Oscar Wilde was right when he said that it is "a form of ugliness so intolerable that we are forced to change it every six months") in the skilled hands of Giacani can represent a glimpse of meaning, waiting for interrogation on man. It may seem risky to assimilate fashion photography to what the philosopher H. G. Gadamer called "the experience of you" in which it is given to listen to the call of the other and let it stand out independently of me. On closer inspection, however, the works shown here are properly 'portraits'. Not so much "miniature narratives", as in the case of Joseph Koudelka but sounding, listening, affirming the other - the female universe? This reminds us of the sophisticated staging of another young emerging in the world of fashion photography, Mustafa Sabbag. As well as the hyperreal and vintage lolite by Francesca Tilio with her Holiday. Perhaps today there is a more severe interest in investigating the meaning of man through his face: and here we could extend the discourse to social photography by JR, with the snapshots of all the inhabitants of a Parisian suburb or at the work of Gianfranco Baruchello with the photos of the wanted by the police in the '30s and' 40s. Returning to the exhibition, only a hasty look could think of the celebration of a beauty reduced to narcissism and seduction, to a delirium of the body in which the individual is not that his skin. I believe that Lucia's dreams, certainly remembering the lesson of masters like R. Avedon with his Dovima with the elephants, are really much shinier, the more they prevent us from such a reduction feared in the surface man by the psychiatrist V. Andreoli. Giacani's photography actually evokes a more sense and depth, which proceeds, albeit between figurative paradoxes and alienating fixity of his subjects, for that clarity that St. Thomas defined as one of the properties of Beauty in which the mystery appears and escapes the fullness of being.'

- Gabriele Bevilacqua, Journalist & Art critic

(translated from Italian)

EXHIBITIONS & PRIZES

Sguardi d'Intesa, group exhibition curated by Angela Madesani, Centro Saint-Benin, Aosta, 2024

Unforgettable a homage to Giovanni Gastel, group exhibition curated by Maria Cristina Brandini, Milan, 2024  

Prize, European windowdresser & Visual Association, Milano 2020

Lucia Giacani, personal exhibition, Alter Art Gallery Shanghai, China 2019

Fashion Calling, presentation of new works, Lumas Art Gallery Milan, Italy 2017

DXB Fashion Photography, collective public photographic exhibition, The Mall of the Emirates, Dubai 2015

Personal photographic exhibition 'Sogni Lucidi', Art Basel Miami, USA, 2014

Personal photographic exhibition 'Sogni Lucidi' Mole Vanvitelliano, Ancona, Italy 2014

Collective photographic exhibition 12^th Festival International de la Photographie de Mode, Cannes, France, 2014

Personal photographic exhibition during 'Fotorma - Art photography festival', Kragujevac, Serbia, 2014 

Collective photographic exhibition 11^th Festival International de la Photographie de Mode, Cannes, France, 2013

Collective photographic exhibition 10^th Festival International de la Photographie de Mode, Cannes, France, 2012

Collective photographic exhibition 9^th Festival International de la Photographie de Mode, Cannes, France, 2011

Collective photographic exhibition 8^th Festival International de la Photographie de Mode, Cannes, France, 2010

Personal photographic exhibition during 'Immagini festival', Lecco, Italy, 2007

Collective photographic exhibition 'TerzoOcchio', The Prefectural Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan, 2007

Personal Photographic exhibition 26 February – 25 March “Somnia” Brancaleone exhibition space, Rome, Italy, 2006

Finalist “Premio Razzano”, Collective Photographic exhibition 7 May – 19 June Museum Sannio e della Rocca dei Rettori, Benevento, Italy, 2005

Personal Photographic exhibition 19 December – 22 January “Alla ragazza inattesa”, Brancaleone exhibition space, Rome, Italy, 2004.

Third place in the photography prize “HERMATENA” organized by the Hermatena publishing, Bologna, Italy, 2004

Winner of the prize, photographic section “Mediterraneo Art”, traveling exhibition, Palermo 2004

Photographic participation in the Marche contemporary art exhibition at the "ART ON" Museum of Contemporary Art, Castel di Lama, Italy, 2004

Personal Photographic exhibition, “Tutto il freddo degli anni”, held in Rome's public gallery “La Finestra sul Cortile” 26 Marzo – 27 April, Rome Italy, 2004          Finalist in the “Festival delle Arti” during the Unity festival, 28 August – 22 September public exhibition Bologna, Italy, 2003

Second prize “GLI ANZIANI- Immagini e grandi scatti”, organized by S. Egidio community, collection exhibition, Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Rome, Italy, 2003.

PUBLICATIONS
Vogue Italia
Vogue.it
Vogue Accessory
Vogue Russia
Vogue India
Vogue UK
Vogue China
Vogue Gioiello
Vogue Sposa
VS 
Vanity Fair Italia
Glamour Italia
Glamour Poland
Glamour Brazil
Modern Weekly China
Harrods magazine
Allure US
Esquire Italia
Elle Arabia
ODDA
L'Officiel Italia
L'Officiel Austria
L'Officiel Brazil
L'Officiel Baltics
L'Officiel Ukraine
L'Officiel India
The Collector
Tatler HK
Tatler Russia
Madame Figaro
Ladies & Gentleman
Gentleman & Lei - MF 
OOB Magazine Paris
La Botanica
Sposa White
Posh
Prestige
 

TV INTERVIEWS

Guarda Chi C'è - Lucia Giacani ITALIAN
Un Caffè che Vale con Piero Muscari ITALIAN

ONLINE INTERVIEWS IN ENGLISH 

Ladies & Gents interview

Marybone & fitzrovia

Coltique

Neverlazy