All images by Lorenzo Grifantini. Used with Permission.
Lorenzo Grifantini is co-founder of a successful architectural company, but as a youngster he always had a passion for the cinema, and by extension, photography. For the past two years he has focused on improving his technical knowledge of photography while always looking for new stories to tell through his images. One of his recent series, Italian Summer caught our attention.
“To me, autumnal England is grey and miserable. Italian Summer, on the other hand, is hot, colourful, tattooed, tanned, dangerous, feral, and furious.” Mr. Grifantini says of the series, “Ultimately, Italian summer is the season when Italians can express their lightness of being and their love for life.” Traveling to the island of Salina in Sicily, Salento in Puglia, and Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany Grifantini’s work does a masterful job of transporting us all to Italia.
Utilizing a Canon 6D and 24-70 initially, Grifantini says that eventually he started to use his Fujifulm X100s for a lot of his work on Italian Summer because the 35mm equivalent focal length forced him to stay closer to his subjects while at the same time being a bit for discreet.
As for his inspiration, Grifantini credit’s the late English photographer Tony Ray-Jones. “…what really changed my idea of how and what I want to tell with photography was discovering the great English photographer Tony Ray-Jones, who, despite [leaving] this world prematurely, left a great heritage of images who [inspired] many other masters after. My idea of trying to find a surreal side in what I see and mixing them with irony and melancholy comes from his idea of photography.”
You can find the entire Italian Summer series below, enjoy, its a real treat.
