Celebrities “au naturel”, without makeup and hairstyling, in the photographer’s portraits.

Private Sitting is a project Gianluca Fontana undertook in order to break beyond a limit, to try to cross the line between the person and the persona and to investigate that boundary through the lens of the emotions – the little gaps, moments of uncertainty, introspection or liberating joy.

Each shot is the sum of deliberate sacrifices: no make-up artist or hair stylist, no costumes, a minimum of light, neutral backgrounds and no other person on the set.Gianluca Fontana has been able to create an intimate space and repay the sense of challenge inherent in this project, while his subjects have been able to seize the opportunity to join a gallery of portraits that absorbs and recapitulates the most significant artistic expressions of contemporary photography.

Begun five years ago, the project has involved fifteen women (Alessandra Mastronardi, Ambra Angiolini, Anita Caprioli, Carolina Crescentini, Cristiana Capotondi, Giulia Elettra Gorietti, Isabella Ferrari, Kasia Smutniak, Margareth Madè, Marta Gastini, Matilde Gioli, Miriam Dalmazio, Tea Falco, Valeria Bilello and Vittoria Puccini), who certainly know the “aesthetic tricks” of an increasingly sophisticated form of photography. In this case, however, they have allowed themselves to be photographed with no “special effects”.

The 44 black-and-white photographs presented here have been selected from the many pictures taken by Ferdinando Scianna on a succession of visits made to Venice between May and June in 2016: they take the form of notes, a series of precise annotations on the course of daily life in a neighbourhood of the city. The result of his work is a lucid and vivid photographic reportage on the Venice Ghetto in the late spring of this year filled with initiatives organized to mark the 500th anniversary of the setting up of the first enclave for the segregation of Jews in the world, the one in Venice. On March 29, 1516, the Senate of the Venetian Republic had in fact decided that all the Jews present in the city should be sent to live together in a courtyard of houses at Cannaregio.

An incomparable photographer with images from all over the world, Roiter started to take photographs in 1947. For twenty-five years, he preferred to use black and white, with an uncompromising formal and compositional rigor and a technique rooted in contrast, a technique he would continue to seek even in his later work with colour. The catalogue celebrates Fulvio Roiter with essays by Italo Zannier and Denis Curti and an anthology of writings on his art. The photographs are organized into thematic sections: Venice in Black and White, The Tree, Venice in Colour, Italy in Black and White, Around the World and A Man Without Desires.

These 250 photographs capture Sicilian Ferdinando Scianna's (born 1943) work for young Dolce & Gabbana; portraits of luminaries such as Roland Barthes, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabelle Huppert, Milan Kundera and John Lennon; plus his anecdotes of photographing them and other career highlights.