On the occasion of the opening of the Milan’s fair, we talked to two photography lovers. The MIA Fair’s creator Fabio Castelli and his daughter Lorenza Castelli, who is director of the exhibition.
How did you start becoming an Art collector ? How was it going on ? Which kind of pictures are you collecting?
F. Castelli : My interest in photography comes directly from my passion for art and in particular for graphics to which I have dedicated my collecting activity since the end of the 1960’s. I think I can identify the passage from graphics to photography was when I understood the affinities between these two methods of representing the world, after analysing in depth and meditating on the cliché-verre practice of the nineteenth- century, a drawing made on a translucent glass that is applied on a photosensitive paper and exposed to the light of the sun; the paper is then submitted to the production and fixing process. In particular I reflected on the reproducibility of both art languages in terms of circulation.
This gradually brought my attention to photography and I started a collection with the same approach I had with the graphic one. If this last one was starting with incunabula then the photography collection had to narrate its story starting from the photogenic drawing.
I therefore started to collect works of already known authors and emerging ones at a time when Italy didn’t have a market of author photography, aware that sooner or later the delay in this field had to be overtaken, looking at what was happening for many years in other Countries economically more advanced.
Even more than this “commercial” aspect I would like to underline that a collection has to be full of passion and I have to say that the discovery and my total devotion to photography is mostly motivated by a big passion for this medium of expression.
