America (with small print)

Franco Fontana
America (with small print)

Photographs: Franco Fontana

Text: Muriel Adrien

Publisher: Contrejour

88 pages

Year: 2020

ISBN: 979-10-90294-40-0

Comments: Hardcover, 28 x 23 cm. With a print (18 x 15 cm). Colors photographs.

We were familiar with Franco Fontana landscapes or seascapes, in which he made work of composition, an ample and colorist composition where graphic purity prevailed and which were used in the book Skyline which appeared in 1978 as a culmination. The subject of American metropolises accompanied by their inevitable urban tumult seemed a priori to go against the coherence of his earlier work of beautiful lines and neat chromatic areas. So what was he going to seek out in the great American metropolises during his various trips from 1985 to 2001?

He loved to confront his Italianness, his references to metaphysics with the works of the great American masters Weston, Walker Evans and the others. “During my various stays in the USA, I recognized my idea of the urban landscape, I found what was already in me and I gathered what I had sown for a long time”.