After 25 years of photographing beautiful women, Marco Glaviano thought he had shot supermodels from about every conceivable camera angle, in every conceivable setting. He collected the glamour work that had made him a top commercial photographer and published a retrospective, Sirens (Warner Treasures/Callaway, 1997).
Instead of making more pictures, he set his cameras aside to take on another job: designing and building the mammoth Pier 59 Studios in Manhattan, which has become the city's premier photo and film rental studio. (That accomplishment landed Glaviano and his partner, Federico Pignatelli, on American Photo's "100 Most Important People in Photography" list in our May/June issue.)
Last year, with the studio up and running, Glaviano decided to relaunch his photographic career with a new body of work; it seems that he had not, after all, exhausted all the angles of looking at beauty. The new work, a collection of digitally fabricated images that echo the structure of Italian futurist painting, were exhibited at the Serge Sorokko Gallery in New York in April, and they will travel to Sorokko's San Francisco gallery in the fall. "For years I indulged my interest in beauty and women, but I just didn't want to shoot another girl in the same way as I had a thousand times before," says Glaviano.
The new work has allowed the 54-yearold photographer to indulge some other abiding interests, including his own artistic roots. Glaviano's great-uncle was the futurist artist Gino Severini. As a boy, Glaviano was surrounded by the Italian avant-garde. "I didn't have a grandfather, and Severini became like one for me," he says. "My family used to vacation with him in Sicily. One of the first photographs I ever made-long before I became a professional-was a snapshot of Severini. He loved it." One of Glaviano's new pieces, a self-portrait, is a direct homage to a self-portrait by his great-uncle.
"Self-Portrait, 1998," by Marco Glaviano
Severini and his fellow futurists-who championed modern notions of speed, noise, light, and energy in the early years of this century—might appreciate the technology Glaviano uses to make his images. On the second floor of the vast Pier 59 complex is a state-of-the-art digital-imaging studio called I-Tek—so state-of-the-art, in fact, that it serves as a beta-testing site for new technology from the Professional Imaging division of Kodak. The I-Tek space, stocked with Silicon Graphics and Macintosh computers, a drum scanner, Iris printers, and more, is hardwired to the Pier 59 shooting studios below—a unique setup for the commercial photographers (and filmmakers) who work at the facility. Glaviano, however, used the digital studio for his personal work while it was still under construction.
Glaviano starts each image by photographing a model with a Nikon F5 from various angles. He uses one of three different lenses, depending on his concept for the image—the 24mm f1.4D AF Nikkor, the 85mm f/1.4D AF Nikkor, or the 105mm f/2.8D AF Micro-Nikkor. Everything is shot on Ektachrome E100S film. "I shoot with a medium-speed color film, because I can always add grain and change it to black and white on the computer later," he says.
On the computer, Glaviano uses Photoshop software to layer portions of different shots onto each other—the final images can consist of as many as 70 layers. The images are then outputted on 1-Tek's Iris 3047 printer; each image consists of four 30x44 panels.
"They're so huge, we had a hard time hanging them in the New York gallery, which is rather narrow," says Glaviano. Buyers with appropriate wall space will have to shell out about $35,000 for one of the pieces, which are being done in single editions. (Single-panel images, in editions of ten, start at $3,000.)
Will Glaviano be destroying his digital files to insure limited quantities? Since no one is certain about the archival longevity of such prints, each piece will be sold with the guarantee that if its colors fade a new, identical print—made from the same digital file—will be supplied. "It's the least we could do," says Glaviano.
