Pino Settanni (Grottaglie, Taranto, 1949–Rome, 2010) left his job at Italsider in Taranto to pursue his passion for photography in Rome. There, he collaborated with various publications and moved in the avant-garde circles centred around galleries such as that of Monique Gregory, his future wife. He thus broadened his vision by creating serial projects such as portraits of figures from the worlds of culture and art, and interpretations of the Tarot, the zodiac signs and the seven deadly sins. He resumed his reportage work in the Balkans and Afghanistan, commissioned by the Italian Army in the late 1990s, to create digitally enhanced images. His archive is held by the Istituto Luce.

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Although he was quite capable, as in his photo-essays, of depicting the world as it appears, Pino Settanni had been too deeply influenced by his knowledge of avant-garde works to fail to carve out a personal creative space within which to sublimate reality. At times he works in a manner that might be described as more traditional, as in the case of the beautiful shot taken in Naples, where the long, narrow street becomes a world of its own, made up of footsteps, voices and vehicles rumbling past. The diptych, also shot in Naples, is particularly interesting as it reveals Settanni’s working method: he presents the classic colour image of the same subject alongside a black-and-white version, on which – as if feeling a longing for colour – he intervenes with small but significant brushstrokes of colour.