Antonio Massara is a photographer and author. He is 63 years old, has a bachelor's degree in economics, is married and has two now grown children.
He has been a marketing manager, CEO, marketing consultant, creative director and Chief Creative Director for many companies, small and medium, since 1991.Throughout all this time he has been doing photography and writing stories, the two red threads that tie all these experiences together over the years.
He started photography in 1975, with his father's cameras and enlarger. With two friends he set up a darkroom in a garage spending endless hours developing and printing in B&W.
In 2005 he began writing works of fiction now published on Amazon as ebooks. A great lover of science fiction literature, his stories are often related to this genre. Photography, however, was always present in his one-copy artist's books.
In 2017 he realized an early dream of becoming a professional photographer with his own studio within an artisans' association in his town, Alab. But it was short-lived, barely a year. It was not working. Yet he persevered by trying to link photographs with stories and turn words into images. This resulted in several works he called 'Eximago'.
In 2024 the turning point: he became a photographer while denying that he was one. After eliminating the mass of shots taken for business, he realized that he continued to see the world that no one else was looking at. Now he devotes himself to this by realizing in his works the particular vision of the world around him.
Acknowledgements:
- Selected photograph at the 2010 Wannabe art Prize;
- Selected photograph at the Monochrome Awards 2025
- Artistic Merit Certificate - Luxembourg Art Prize - 2019,2020,2022,2024.
Why 'make photography'
Wim Wenders wrote that photography is too beautiful to be true and also too true to be beautiful. It is a phrase that encapsulates the extraordinary power of photography but also of being a photographer, of being on the side of the viewfinder.
As many have said, photography expresses the soul of the person who takes it. And so, putting the two concepts together, it is the search for beauty in an imperfect World that makes photography an extraordinary art, within everyone's reach, in an attempt to make sense of experience.
On this theme, Antonio Massara had an epiphany.
He was in one of the alleys of his city's historic center, one of those places usually frequented by tourists. He was eating a pizza, a good pizza, and he was sitting in front of a very high, windowless wall, that of the Church of Santa Ninfa dei Crociferi. The restaurants on the street had enlivened that anonymous wall with a shower of illuminations. A black, inaccessible, very high, distressing wall at night had become Christmassy, cheerful, inviting, even free.
Antonio thought of photographing it. He had his mirrorless camera with him with a 60 mm macro lens, a medium tele.
As soon as he left the club, he opened his backpack and picked it up. He turned it on and looked through the viewfinder.
The World changed.
The camera framed four lights and the cracks in the wall: the simple craft of the instrument. He instead saw Another World. Gone was the Church, erased the Alley, there remained the four lights and the breach in the wall. Too True to be Beautiful, yet still Beautiful. A Beautiful World.
Yeah.
But only he could see it. And so he shot to fulfill the Magic.
Photography is Magic.
It transforms the world, the way you see it, stop and look at it, too real to be beautiful and yet still extraordinary, wonderful and terrible.
And that is precisely what photography is all about. Because looking from the viewfinder every time transform the World, transcends it, stops time to look at itself with the mind of the beholder.
Magic, indeed.
And Magician its photographer.