An image of a summer beach: Massimo Vitali

An image of a summer beach, crowded; there is no space between one chair and another, between one towel and another, all arranged along the strip of sand between the sea and the city; people walk and cluster at the water’s edge. The light is white, bright, casting no shadows; saturated colors are scattered throughout the landscape. It is an image captured from afar, almost clinical, where each individual is an inseparable part of the mass.

After this beach comes another, then a city, a picnic in the countryside, a ski slope, a nightclub… and in each of these moments, when Massimo Vitali clicks his camera, he freezes an instant of contemporary leisure, adding another photograph to our collective imagination.

Since 1993, the Italian photographer has been working on his large-format series, investigating human behavior with the intent of a social analysis through the repetition of the same composition with subtle differences. That year, Silvio Berlusconi won his first presidential election in Italy, and Vitali’s curiosity about how this political shift affected everyday life led him to observe mass gatherings.

Taken with a large-format camera, his photographs require a technical setup in which they must be shot from a platform several meters high, ensuring both distance and focus. The apparent normality of vacation scenes serves as a pretext to explore themes of false complacency, the illusion of well-being, the commodification of leisure, the invasion of nature, vital conformity, exposed sexuality, and cynical hedonism. Many things are happening in that instant, capturing both the best and the worst of Western society. These are landscapes from anywhere, from the "non-place," where human characteristics are on full display.

Baró Galeria presents, for the first time in Brazil, a selection of Vitali's work, which, in addition to his renowned beach scenes, includes urban scenes from Barcelona and Florence. The collection recreates the photographer’s world—crowded and ironic—and invites us to reflect on our own leisure and ways of life.

Massimo Vitali (Como, Italy, 1944) lives between Lucca, Italy, and Berlin, Germany. He studied classical culture at Liceo in Milan before graduating from the London College of Printing. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, he built a career as a photojournalist, focusing on his artistic production from the 1990s onward.

Vitali has exhibited his series in galleries and museums worldwide. His works are part of collections at the Guggenheim Museum, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, and the Centre Pompidou d’Art Contemporain in Paris, as well as the Arken Museum in Denmark, the MMK Frankfurt am Main in Germany, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Denver in the United States, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the MUSAC in León, Spain.