The Roman School of Photography is a cultural reference point and it became a recognized part of the artistic landscape of the capital. The school is the realization of a dream and fruit of a project of an artist, who since the early 70s has been animating the roman culture life, Angelo Caligaris, painter and photographer. In 1992, he established, together with Duccio Trombadori, an educational centre with the aim to train future professional photographers as well as to lay theground for developing a deeper insight into other form of artistic expression.
It was the year 1847 when an international group of photographers, with a keen interest in technological innovations in photography, met in café Greco to discuss objectives and activities with regards to the architecture and landscape of Rome of Pope Pius IX. The latest technological developments, the paper negative altogether with a new style in photography – romantic-pictorials- led to the emergence of an enthusiastic group with more coherent methods of photographic work. Apart from French photographers Flacheron, Normand and Constant, the group, whose works were shown in many important exhibitions in Paris, consisted of Giacomo Caneva and James Anderson, British rival to Alinari, who depicted urban landscapes in a form of a postcard.
We are proud of the fact that the history of our school is rooted in the past so noble and full of innovation, at the same time Roman and cosmopolitan. We are also proud to trace our ancestry to the Roman School, emerged from the discordant voices ofschools of painting of the 30s of the 20th century and a romantic photography of the 19thcentury. In our veins runs the sap of the progressive root that binds our name to that great artists who remained attentive to the most urgent and vital problems of humanity, without ever bending to a single philosophy, monarch, regime, discarding bombastic rhetoric, avoiding the rude and grandiloquent language of power and empty, pompous official manner. However, it should also be remembered that there is another element flowing in our blood: that of photographic research, passionate and friendly, hardly content with what has already been said, done, seen and heard. We are heirs of trends that arise from a particular territory but by nature speak the universal language. The arts, and photography too, can easily evolve into rigidacademic subjects, unless you create a nucleus of thought and action that promotes freedom of research without sacrificing the technique of photography. The Roman school felt it was the latter and we are their heirs.
We are born in a way like the crowns of pines of Pincio terraces, which reign on the horizon; moulded by the neoclassical panorama of Piazza del Popolo and by its colours at sunset we are born to some extent as if from the ruins of a bombed town., such as accurate tonal transitions Mafais’ frameworks , thirsty like a Pirandellos’ white and pink , elegant and cruel as the reds of Scipione, we feel at home among the excited crowd swarming the Spanish Steps and at Christmas as midsummer, speaks all languages the world, but we are also at home among the desperate crowd wot on, July 19 ‘43, is listening to Pius XII who rushed to the Scalo San Lorenzo in the rubble of the bombing.
We believe in direct contact with things, to refine strategies of documentary , but also to refine the links between and artistic and photographic point of view, in a process of identity formation, not only as a professional photographer, but also as a conscious witness, observer and interpreter of one’s own time. We have many stories to tell and many we would like to know, with so many experiences to share as well as to live through. We are immersed in the history but at the same time we are focused on the signs of the future. We live and we are witness of creative and photographic research, social engagement and contact with the territory in a city that has always spoken to the world. We are deeply conscious and proud of all that, and that is the baggage that we bring when we meet with others, connect to the global network of the twenty-first century.