Paolo Verzone

Paolo
Verzone

Koninklijke Militaire Academie - Cadet van Vilsteren.

biography

Italian photographer, born in 1967, lives and works between Paris (France) and Barcelona (Spain).

As a student of literature and design, he realized his first assignments for the Italian press at the age of 18. If he covers the news in a world in perpetual turmoil, he nevertheless looks at it with the distance of those who prefer the time of observation to the urgency of the moment. He then immerses himself in long-term projects to propose series that question, in substance and in black and white, the current world.

Whether it be a series of portraits of Europeans at the beach (Seeuropeans 1994 – 2002), or of passers-by in the streets of Moscow (Moscow Project 1991 / 2001/ 2011), his first personal projects, carried out in collaboration with his partner Alessandro Albert, question the relationship between a shared social identity and the multiple individual singularities that make it up.

In the 2000s, he moved to Paris, joined the Agence VU’, and switched from black and white to colour, from film to digital, all the while asserting his perfect mastery of light and compositional balance. In his portraits or documentary reportage, he photographs with rigour and eclecticism the way in which the individual composes with his social environment. With “Cadets” (2009-2013), he sets out to meet the officer cadets of the great military academies of Europe, bearers of both a tradition and a future, thus continuing his questioning of European identity.

From 2010-2015, the diversity of the stories he reports – from the Cannes Festival to the COP21, from Catalan demonstrations to the backstage of Matignon – leads him to explore more broadly the relationship of the individual to his own environment, on a social, cultural, historical and geographical level. He is particularly interested in scientists, whose mission is precisely to better understand what binds life to the world.

In 2015, he documented the lives of the climatologists at the Ny Alesund Arctic Research Station (Svalbard, Norway), scientists who came from all over the world to study the open-air laboratory that is the Arctic, and initiated a long-term project on this very special territory to which he regularly travels.

At the same time, he develops photographic stories of different types of researchers around the world and is notably assigned by National Geographic to documents archaeological missions (Bible Hunters in 2019; Reimagining Dinosaurs in 2020).

Winner of three World Press Photo awards, Paolo Verzone regularly collaborates with the French and international press (National Geographic, Time, The guardian, Der Spiegel, Mare, Geo, Le Monde, Libération, among others), with companies, foundations and institutions. Regularly exhibited, his photographs have been included in prestigious collections such as those of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, Great Britain), the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris, France), and the Instituto Nazionale della Grafica (Rome, Italy).

Series

The renewal of the Egyptian archaeology, 2023

Series | Two hundred years after Champollion decoded the first hieroglyphs and one hundred years after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, Egypt is reclaiming its past and placing its heritage in the hands of a whole new generation of local archaeologists, using the best technological tools.

Home-Réalisations Paolo Verzone séries

Spitzbergen, 2015-2022

Series | A document on the little known role of scientists who come to observe and try to understand global climate change on the small Norwegian island of Spitzbergen, in the town of Ny Alesund, 1000km from the North Pole.

Home-Réalisations Paolo Verzone séries

Portrait of Camargue, 2021

Series| From Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to Arles, through the Camargue Regional Natural Park, from the Aigues Mortes salt flats to the rice farms, photographer Paolo Verzone spent a year in the Camargue, an astonishing region where water and land are one.