Televisiva Format: Paperback

Photographer Stefano De Luigi explores how Italian TV shifted in the 1990s, from a cultural beacon to a shallow source of distraction and pleasure. Text in English and Italian.

In the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, Italian television started changing its face. What was once a monochrome yet illuminating beacon of culture turned into a blinding excuse for everything. Forget ignorance, there’s pleasure! Never mind understanding, just don’t look deeper! In his new book, photographer Stefano De Luigi decodes the hard truths that lie hidden in the static. Curated by Laura Serani with brilliant commentary by Pietro Grossi, the book will be launched in November at Paris Photo.

Text in English and Italian.

Stefano De Luigi (born 1964) is a German-born Italian photographer. He has been a member of VII Photo Agency since 2008 and lives in Paris. Stefano has won the World Press Photo contest four times in different categories (1998-2007-2010-2011). In 2000 he received the Honorable Mention of Leica Oskar Barnack Award. That same year he started a personal project titled Pornoland, a photographic journey on pornographic film sets around the world. In 2004 Pornoland became a book with a text by Martin Amis, published in 5 countries. From 2003 to 2010, he worked on Blanco—a photographic project on the life condition of blind people around the world. Blanco received the patronage of the World Health Organization and won the W.E. Smith Fellowship Grant in 2007. In 2006 Stefano De Luigi embarked on the project Cinema Mundi, a World Cinema exploration on the alternative cinematographic scene far away from Hollywood dream factory, including countries such as China, Russia, Iran, Argentina, Nigeria, South Korea and India. In 2010, Blanco was published by Trolley books and won the POYi Best Photography Book Award in 2011. In 2017 he published his third book iDyssey and in 2018 the book Babel'. His photographs have been published in magazines including Stern, Paris Match, Le Monde 2, Time, The New Yorker, Geo, Vanity Fair, El Pais and Sunday Time Magazine.