Born in Lucca in 1978, Filippo Brancoli Pantera is an Italian photographer whose work emerges from the intersection of visual observation and cultural reflection. He earned a degree in Cultural Heritage from the University of Florence (2004) and a Master’s in Cultural History from the University of Pisa (2025). In 2008, he moved to New York City to attend the Documentary Photography program at the International Center of Photography (ICP), where he received a scholarship and worked as a teaching and field assistant alongside master photographers such as Frank Fournier and Joshua Lutz.

In 2010, he returned to Italy and began a collaboration with artist and friend Massimo Vitali. In the following years he developed a long-term visual exploration of the borderlands between city and countryside — the so-called “rurban” spaces — across regions of France, Switzerland, and Italy.

Since 2020, his practice has taken on a new dimension. In an era of frantic pursuit of the new, he slows down and repeatedly returns to the same subjects, cultivating a connection that grows deeper, more sustained, and almost ritualistic. Any subject, if observed at length and repeatedly, reveals aspects that a cursory glance will never capture. This approach challenges contemporary consumerist trends and transforms the act of photography into a moment of listening and contemplation.

For limited edition prints (5 editions + 2 ap), please contact:

Filippo Brancoli Pantera

filippobrancoli@gmail.com

or:

Riseart gallery

https://www.riseart.com/artist/131671/filippo-brancoli-pantera

or:

Galleria ConsArc

Switzerland

https://galleriaconsarc.ch
galleria@consarc.com
+41 (0) 91 683 79 4

Via Gruetli 1 CH-6830 Chiasso

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition Into the Landscape (Switzerland 2017) signed by Roberta Valtorta.

The relationship between man and the environment in which he lives and has designed over the course of time, is one of the key topics in contemporary photography.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the attentive observation of the world through the eye of photography was a very important method to investigate and understand places and their historical stratifications and complexity charged with memento. Places could unveil individual and collective identities if photographed thoroughly over a longer period of time. Later places became non-places and identities became blurred and alterable. A new term appeared: super -places. With the profound transformation of the city, the provincial territories and the countryside that became increasingly pocketed by urban schemes and patterns, we are faced with a change of scale: spaces and objects are in the process of decentralisation and expansion. Photography, simultaneously hard-pressed by the globalised digital age and the all-embracing and pulsing Internet, responded in two ways to the question of the representation of cultivated spaces. On one hand, photographers focused on the detail of every day life: a wall, a street, a house and its interior, the light, the grass of a lawn, the door of a house, the dust of a periphery, and than a face and individual stories. Small details, marginal and circumstantial: fragments. On the other hand, photographers returned to the grand vedute, antique and noble.

Consider the first daguerrotypes of the city, or even further back, the vedute and romantic period in painting. This style was emploit as a means of capturing the great complexity, modulation and repetition of the structures built by mankind and the accumulation of diverse functions of the different parts of the landscape: from producing to residing, from production facilities to the fields. Ultimately artists were trying to measure a constructed world that was no longer measurable by the human eye. In our complex present, Filippo Brancoli Pantera chooses this type of photography, establishing a distance from which we can look at the world both constructed by mankind, as well as capturing the untouched parts of the landscape - a distance that guarantees a comprehensive vision of the cultural territory, which allows the viewer to take back control over the scene. This distance is with no doubt one of the methods utilised by a vast group of contemporary artists: from John Davies, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, or Peter Bialobrzewski, Sze Tsung Leong and Taiji Matsue, to the Italians Walter Niedermayr, Olivo Barbieri, Vincenzo Castella, Gabriele Basilico, Armin Linke, Massimo Vitali and Domingo Milella. To mention only a few.

The vision Brancoli Pantera adopted is in its own way, powerful because he looks to design concluded narrations, wide and never fragmentary. It is about a socio -anthropological view on landscape, that not only looks at the big city, but also at the provincial territories, where the relationship between constructed and untouched landscapes - the mountains with their rocks, the forest, the lawns, the cultivated hills and the waters- is more evident. As if the author was searching once again beyond the creation of great pictures the possibility of a residue of intimacy of space, that could reveal the path of mankind and his reasons for his choices in time.

Roberta Valtorta

Milan, 27 August 2017.