Giovanni Zaccagnini, a 30-year-old Italian fashion photographer, immediately raises the question of whether fashion photography can be considered art. Clearly the more widely respected photographers of the genre will be those take the concept into more creative and abstract realms than the GQ formula, but as a rule, how many truly hideous pictures can you take of a beautiful woman wearing very little on a carefully dressed set? And is it even possible to somehow photograph more than that, to capture something significant amongst the shiny ornaments selected and artfully arranged beforehand? Cynically, fashion photography seems to become Art only after the style it captures lapses into the past and becomes a cultural artefact. Still, as I say - half-naked women, well-paid photographers, expensive sets. It's the MSG of photography.
Zaccagnini's website offers a lot of images, but his composition skills seem to falter at the digital level. Most of the images are scans of magazine pages and the layout is pretty basic and uninspired, although it succeeds in functional terms. His brief biography reveals all you might already have guessed from the minimal text content -
After finishing high school I went and leave in NY looking for work, adventure and also to learn english better.
When I came back to Rome after a while, I started working and studing at the same time. After one year I went to Naples to see the exibith of Mario Testino. That's when he asked me to go and work for him in Paris.
I went and after 3 years of assisting, I decided I was ready to go my way.
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