Sandro Scalia

Born in Ragusa in 1959. Lives in Palermo

Immediately after receiving a diploma in photography from Milan's Società Umanitaria and the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, Sandro Scalia began to collaborate with numerous magazines and publishers. When he left Milan in 1991 to return to Sicily, his choice of subjects seem to fall naturally on the sites of his native Palermo, the contrasts and contradictions of which are narrated through the city's transformations over time. In the Notturni series, for example, the Sicilian capital becomes the city of dormitory suburbs, the desolate and seemingly uninhabited outskirts, while I bagnanti del mare captures images of bodies in the blinding afternoon light on the sunny beach of Mondello. Letture siciliane reveals the photographer's preference for an elongated horizontal format, in which the composition's diagonals guide one's vision toward the center of the image. Rather than the topography of places, Scalia interest lies in their social and aesthetic identity, narrated through the play of halftones and shadows. (A.T.)