Marco Ambrosi, Verona, Italy
Born in 1959 in Zaire, at the age of twenty years I started working as a photographer of architecture, then explored other specialties, focusing for many years on still-life and the production of surreal images. For a long time I've worked exclusively for advertising, cultivating various passions: literature, music, painting, film, graphics.
My collaborations are mainly required by customers of the great italian economy centers, but I work in my city with a network of partners in different fields such calligraphy, copy-writing, photography, music, food, public relations, graphic and industrial design, outsider-art.
By the years the love for glossy images tempered to become a keen interest in humanity and his cultures, explored and told in the form of series and portraits. This has resulted in interesting hybridations with other disciplines - such as calligraphy, sound and music, video, dance, writing - that gave birth to collective works and installations.
Hyperactive investigator, I devote great efforts to research through projects that have earned me exhibitions, publications and awards in Italy and worldwide.
As an advertising photographer I have worked for large part of the most important italian companies; as a cultural activist I currently organize events, shows; as a teacher I currently collaborate with schools and institutions devoted to social promotion; as an author I’ve shown my work in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Slovakia, Poland, England, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, USA, China, Nigeria, Senegal.
Portraits in Black
Self-taught photographer, from the outset he’s worked mainly in advertising, over the years cultivating a style inspired by certain forerunners in the field of painting: Caravaggio and Chardin for the use of light, Magritte and De Chirico for the subjects. As is more and more often the case in the film industry as well, the separation between the photographic shot and post-production is slowly disappearing. Marco Ambrosi’s studio was one of the first in Italy to equip himself with sophisticated digital workstations using continually updated software and know-how. Although the majority of his collaborations involves clients in the great financial centers, he’s always preferred working in his city, where he’s also created a professional network with other photographers, illustrators, web designers, graphic artists and type designers.
Italy’s going through a period of great cultural stimulus and provocation. In recent years the peace and quiet of a traditionally regional country has been challenged by new codes of behavior, languages, cuisines and clothing. New non-European populations are radically changing our urban landscapes. Astride the two millenia, today’s Italy is in the throes of a rebirth that profoundly renewed the lives of the British, French and Germans half a century ago. In Liverpool, Lyon and Hannover the rasta look, the kebab flavor and the sound of the sitar have become part of everyone’s daily life. And they are not phenomena limited to large cities, to the contrary. In his home city of Verona, Ambrosi’s discovered groups of non-European residents in absolutely natural and by no means acade circumstances. Capturing their new expressions, colors, textiles and gestures with candid curiosity and technical expertise has been an experience of poetic impact. This first series of "Portraits in black" of Verona’s Ghanese and Nigerian residents gathered in the city’s centers to celebrate their music festivals and religious holidays, united by their deeprooted Pentecostal faith, is one of the many small steps that with constant and ineluctible historical logic are gradually but finally moving us away from a Counter-Reformation provincialism variously labeled “new economy”, “padanian race”, “european civilization”.
