FACE TO FACE - Writers & More

Portraits for the Milanese literary festival Writers.

On the occasion of several editions of Writers, the Milanese literary festival conceived and directed by Francesco Matteo Cataluccio and co-founded with Stefania Vaccari, I created a series of portraits of the festival’s guest authors, held at the Frigoriferi Milanesi.

The festival is a space for meetings, readings, music, conversations, and cross-disciplinary exchanges. My photographic approach took an opposite direction: subtraction. Within the lively and dynamic context of the festival, I set up a minimal and quiet space: a black background, light focused on the face, with no additional props. A strict setup that isolated the author from the flow of events, bringing attention solely to presence, gaze, and expressive power of the face.

The portrait thus became a suspended moment: a true face to face, a direct encounter between author and camera, between word and image. Writers and intellectuals such as Tiziano Scarpa, Marina Mander, Benedetta Tobagi, Adonis, Milo De Angelis, Elisabetta Bucciarelli, Barry Miles, Mimmo Borrelli, Valeria Benatti, Helena Janeczek, and Antonio Moresco, among many other prominent figures of the Italian and international cultural scene, posed in front of the camera.

Over time, this sequence of portraits has built a coherent and recognizable gallery, a visual archive capturing the diversity of contemporary literary voices through a single formal language. The project resulted in the e-book Face to Face. Writers & More, enriched with an introductory text by Francesco Matteo Cataluccio and published for free download at the opening of the festival, as well as an exhibition, which expanded the portraits into a physical space, allowing the faces to interact with each other and with the public in an immersive way, combining aesthetic research, cultural documentation and memory-making. Writing not only narrated but made visible.