Italian photographer Paolo Ventura is known for constructing and photographing elaborate dioramas to tell cinematic visual stories. Ventura controls the entire artistic process - constructing and painting the small-scale scenes, photographing the sets, and hand painting the photographs. He will often collage figures - portraits of himself and his family - to the surface of the photographs. The works, evocative of 1940s and 50s Italian Neorealism film, are both sweet and sorrowful.
Paolo Ventura was born in 1968 in Milan and studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in the early 1990s. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Forma International Center for Photography, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art of Roma (MACRO), Rome; The Hague Museum of Photography, The Hague; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome and during the Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles. In 2012, he was selected to create a series of works for the Italian national pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. In 2020, Ventura’s first major survey exhibition on the last 15 years of his career, Carousel, was held at CAMERA in Turin. The exhibition was accompanied by a new monograph.