It was through a celebration of geometric lines and a riot of colors that Franco Fontana revolutionized the art of Niepce in the early 1960s. Using all the optical possibilities of the ...
It was through a celebration of geometric lines and a riot of colors that Franco Fontana revolutionized the art of Niepce in the early 1960s. Using all the optical possibilities of photography—bold framing, shallow depth of field, plunging shots—he creates, by juxtaposition of bright and highly contrasted hues, minimalist and abstract images. This choice of color, against the current of a classic black and white photography considered only as artistic, makes him a precursor.
Born on December 9, 1933 in the historic heart of Modena, from a modest family, Fontana quickly left school and worked various small jobs: delivery man, hairdresser—which he had to give up because he was allergic to color! then bottle washer at a producer in Lambrusco. It was in the army, thanks to a comrade, that he discovered photography. At the end of his military service, he rented a Kodak Retina 3 and took his first shots, first in black and white, then very quickly in color. Self-taught, he became a professional photographer only in 1976, at the age of 46, after managing a furniture and design store and marrying, as his second wife, Uti, the woman of his life.
A RADICAL CHOICE
Until the late 1950s, photography remained dominated by black and white. Color, perceived as "vulgar" and associated with fashion or amateur photography, is rejected by great photographers. Henri Cartier-Bresson sees it as a simple "professional necessity"; Robert Frank stated in 1975: "Black and white are the colors of photography." In addition to these precautions, there is the obligation to go through a laboratory, considered as an obstacle to creative freedom.
Yet Fontana chose the Ektachrome—cheaper film, faster to develop, and which does not require sending it to a Kodak laboratory (there was none in Modena in 1960). Its colors are softer, its grain less fine, and it resists poorly to light alterations: many of his images have faded, and today it is at the cost of a dusting and digital color correction that we find the original colors. However, he remained faithful to it until the arrival of digital technology, testing Cibachrome and Dye-transfer as a simple curiosity. The concern for sustainability was never his: without the intervention of his daughter Cristina, a large part of the work would have disappeared in the sympathetic clutter of his archives.
The sources of a vision
By the end of the 1950s, all Fontana was already there: landscapes, urban architecture, juxtapositions of primary colors, abstraction and minimalism. How to explain it? As a child, he lived among the colorful facades of Modena. A fan of hooky, he travels through a countryside where the bright yellow of rapeseed contrasts with an intense blue sky. With his architect brother, he learned about the golden ratio and the charm of geometric lines. "Photography is not what we see, but what we are," he says.
In the United States, color was recognized as early as 1962, when John Szarkowski organized at MoMA the exhibition of Ernst Haas, then with Stephen Shore (American Surfaces, 1973) and William Eggleston (1976). In Italy, where neorealist aestheticism dominates, Fontana advances alone. In 1970, Lanfranco Colombo dedicated an exhibition to him at the gallery Il Diaframma, in Milan; in 1971, his first monograph, Modena una Città, was published. Since 1975, he participates every year in the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles, where he will build strong friendships.
A FLAGSHIP BOOK: SKYLINE
In 1978, Punto e Virgola—the publishing house founded in Modena by Luigi Ghirri—published Skyline, simultaneously in France with Editions Contrejour. Success was immediate: two reissues in the same year. Through elaborate framing and rigorous composition, Fontana creates a new grammar of the image: an explosion of colors that pulverizes reality. The horizon line shares the image in pure planes; in Comacchio, the symmetry is such that any landmark is abolished.
One may be tempted to compare the Skylines to American Color Field painting, but at Rothko, color reveals light, while at Fontana, light reveals color. His landscapes, devoid of any geographical reference, exult with warmth and sensuality. «When I photograph a landscape and the landscape enters me, I make a self-portrait.» From 1968 to 1978, the entire Mediterranean—from Spain to the Adriatic, from the Camargue to Emilia-Romagna—passed through this vision.
THE 1980s: CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE
This graphic writing, having reached maturity, now applies to urban architecture: Milan, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, but especially New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. At the telephoto lens, defying the laws of perspective, Fontana isolates, fragments, recomposes. These images, where flat areas of bright colors geometrically arranged diffuse all the energy of the New World, announce the principle of collage that will structure his work in the 2000s.
The human figure makes its appearance thanks to a challenge: in 1979, Ralph Gibson invited Fontana to participate in the book Contact Theory, provided he worked in black and white. By photographing Il Palazzo della Cns d'EUR, in Rome, he discovers the importance of shadow—presence and absence of the body, mystery and anxiety. From 1982, it addresses the theme of the pool. Where Hockney celebrates California and Meyerowitz the crepuscular seaside, Fontana offers fragments of female bodies on an intense blue, as in a surrealist painting. This sensuality will flourish fully in the Polaroid, which he manipulates by scraping, gluing and transferring.
AMERICA
In 2020, Éditions Contrejour published a volume gathering his travels in the major American cities from 1985 to 2001. During my stays in the United States, I recognized my idea of the urban landscape; I found what was already inside me," he wrote. Passersby—often women seen from behind—walk through these settings like theater silhouettes; Color darkens, geometry dominates, individuals have the same thickness as their shadow. We find the metaphysical atmosphere of the Palazzo della Cns. Far from the American Street Photography—the one, vernacular, of Eggleston, Shore or Meyerowitz, shaped by pop art, jazz and cinema—Fontana remains deeply classical, heir to Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and De Chirico. However, it integrates digital technology as soon as it is released: it inlays characters, recomposes shadows and even revives its old images by accentuating the contrasts.
FROM THE STREET TO THE ROAD
Since 1971, Fontana photographs while driving, without looking into the viewfinder; A long exposure time summarizes about fifty meters of landscape in a single image. Asphalt itself becomes a subject: its signs and graphics, captured from 1971 to 2005, evoke Brassaï. The car interests him for its shape, often half hidden under a tarp, like a Christo.
In 2001, at the invitation of Danilo Montecchi, he tackled Route 66, a mythical transcontinental route of more than 3,600 km that Kerouac and, after him, Edward Ruscha, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz helped to immortalize. The journey, conducted in ten days, gives a book prefaced by Franco Vaccari and Michele Smargiassi, accompanied by a travel journal written by Valerio Massimo Manfredi. Like his American predecessors, Fontana does not escape the ghosts of the past, but he knows how to seize with humor the traces of the American dream.
Following El Camino (2002) and the via Appia (2003)—this Roman road of nearly 500 km, original route that prefigures all others since Antiquity, including the 66. The opportunity for Fontana to rediscover the Italian landscapes that punctuated all his work and to reconnect, through images, with a past at the origin of our civilization.
RETROSPECTIVE?
In sixty-five years of a rich and varied career, Franco Fontana has published about sixty books, responded to many commercial requests, organized a photography festival in San Marino, animated multiple workshops, and even registered, for his pleasure, in the course of postal art so admirably illustrated by Italian futurists. Without theorizing his work, Franco Fontana has always been able to nourish it with a whole culture and dialogue with all the major artistic movements of the 21st century: surrealism, abstraction, minimalism, pop art... He was, like the American photographers of color, a precursor and pioneer.
Therefore, in front of this work so brilliantly prolific, one can hesitate to speak of retrospective. At most, we can sketch the outline. That of a photographer who will have marked the history of photography and accompanied, with the grace of a dilettante, contemporary art.
Exhibition curator: Jean-Luc Monterosso
