Paolo Ventura: A Vanishing Man

A successful fashion photographer for Elle and Vogue, Italian artist Paolo Ventura turned his back on commercial work and moved into a farmhouse in Tuscany, where he began to create narrative photomontages staged against painted backdrops, with props and costumes he found in the village flea market and often featuring himself, his wife, and his son. Pregnant with narrative possibility, the photographs are at once nostalgic, social realist, and surreal, variously evoking artists such as René Magritte and Edward Hopper and filmmakers such as Jean Cocteau and Roy Andersson.

Directed by Erik van Empel