Alive: Big Roots by Francesco Bosso

Francesco Bosso (Italy, 1959) is one of the leading Italian black-and-white photographers of landscape and the wildness of nature. His meticulous artistic investigation is aimed at isolating natural forms and elements in untouched places, where silence reigns supreme—a mix of “atmospheres” and deep thinking, concepts that he consistently attempts to express in a whisper, rather than a roar, in an attempt to put the observer perfectly at ease.

His visual conceptualisation, his extraordinary mastery of large-format photos, and his virtuosity in the darkroom allow him to produce photographic works characterised by intensely nuanced gradations of black and white and exceptional depth of tonal contrasts. His works reveal a kind of theoretical and creative fundamentalism, in constant tension with analytical depth, the act of creation, and a reductionist spirit. These undergo a process of obsessive subtraction, reducing scenes to their bare minimum, since the superfluous becomes chaos and confusion. The photos subvert our contemporary context, which goes in an entirely different direction.

After years devoted to ethnographic research in China and many African countries—documented in two books of photographs, Swahili: African Portraits and China Crossing—he turned to the natural world as the foundation for his thinking, of his studies of the effects of light, developing a deep approach to photography and total control of the photographic process that allow him to transfer to the viewer something more that goes beyond a mere image.

In 2014, his works were exhibited at the Museo delle Arti Visive in Spoleto. This impressive show was the culmination of almost eight years of work and represented a magnificent voyage in abstraction, integrating panoramic photography and pictorial subject matter. In 2015, Bosso participated in the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, in which he presented his imposing triptych “Arrays” as part of the exhibition Present Nearness.

His works are included in important public and private collections, and exhibitions of his photos have been mounted by national and international institutions like Camera Museum in Torino, Pignatelli Museum in Napoli, Pino Pascali Museum in Polignano, Visual Art Museum in Spoleto, Candiani Cultural Center in Venice, National Museum of Photography in Brescia, as well as the Cultural Centre Museum in Hong Kong, and the M50 Space Gallery in Shanghai. He has also had noteworthy solo shows in Munich, Paris, Karlsruhe, and Brussels.