Bio

Antonella Sacconi, a photographer and teacher of Italian and Latin, currently lives and works in Milan. She was born in Messina in 1961 but grew up moving to different Italian cities due to being the daughter of an army general. From childhood, she showed an interest in photography and the ancient world, which would shape her studies and profession. In the late 1970s, she began taking photos with an Olympus OM2, experimenting with various film development techniques. Initially, she focused on landscape photography, studying the works of great Italian masters, including Mario Giacomelli. In the photographer's shots, the curved lines of the Marche hills, punctuated by parallel imprints of plowed fields, transform into a succession of graphic signs—a language that would also influence Antonella Sacconi in her subsequent photographs dedicated to contemporary architecture. Alongside her early photographic experiments, Antonella Sacconi dedicated herself to archaeological studies, moving between Venice and Florence, where she earned a degree in Greek Archaeology. In 1991, she published the book "L'avventura archeologica di Francesco Morosini ad Atene, 1687-1688" (The Archaeological Adventure of Francesco Morosini in Athens, 1687-1688), dedicated to a chapter in Venetian military history that unfortunately led to the compromise of the Parthenon, which until then had remained nharmed. Her knowledge of the ancient world influences the aesthetics of her artistic work, which over the years has focused primarily on photographs of contemporary architecture. In these shots, the artist rediscovers some formal characteristics typical of the classical world, such as the purity of forms, the symmetry of elements, and the balance of spaces. Through her photographs, these stylistic elements are enhanced to create completely abstract images composed of essential geometric elements—shapes, lines, and volumes—repeated rhythmically and according to mathematical proportions. While on one hand, Sacconi admires and analyzes the language of contemporary starchitects, on the other hand, through her photographic lens, she transforms these buildings into abstract curvilinear or linear patterns. This effect is achieved through the use of black and white and close-up shots of individual architectural details. Iconic buildings of international fame, easily recognizable, are completely decontextualized to become structures with a new identity. At the same time, however, her photographs always possess a real dimension, determined by the constant presence of human figures in relation to the architecture. The photographer aims to bring back the person in their primordial sense of "Homo Faber," always being the creator and at the same time, the user of what they create. It is no coincidence that archaeology is the science that studies the material evidence of human presence in the world throughout history. Antonella Sacconi's photographs, therefore, transcend time and space, sealing these two dimensions in images where ancient and contemporary mirror each other, where humans always remain the main protagonists.