Vincenzo Castella, born in Naples in 1952, currently lives in Milan. He began photographing in 1975. Between 1975 and 1982, he completed “Private Geography,” a series of color photographs depicting domestic interiors. In 1976, 1978, and 1980, he traveled to the United States, where he worked on the project “Hammie Nixon’s People,” a semi-imaginary biography of blues singers dedicated to African Americans, their lives, and the architecture of southern cities (photographs and 16mm films). Since 1980, he has exhibited his works in Europe and the United States.
In 1998, he started a photographic series on European city buildings. His photographs became increasingly “antinarrative” as he created visual hypotheses of the complexity and interweaving of cities, producing large color prints from medium and large format films. His research focuses on distance and dislocation. This line of work includes images of Italian and European cities such as Naples, Milan, Turin, Rouen, Caen, Le Havre, Helsinki, and Berlin, as well as of territories and sites such as Ramallah and Jerusalem.
Since 2006, Castella has been creating installations based on large-format photographic negatives, such as “Chronicles from Milan,” presented at Art Unlimited – Basel 2009. The movements of a virtual camera provide an articulated interpretation of photography and the relationships between what is seen and what is unseen in urban life. His work is not driven by stylistic evolution but rather by systematic repertoire reduction and language synthesis
