Paolo Di Paolo, a photographer who captured the bucolic romance of post-war Italy and intimate images of stars like Sofia Loren, died last month. He was 98 years old.
self-taught hobbyist, At DiPaolo’s career was brief but prolific. Between the early 1950s, when he first picked up a camera, and the late 1960s, when he hung it up for good, the artist produced some 250,000 negatives, prints and slides. Many were done on assignment for mid-century lifestyle magazines like Tempo, He WorldAnd Successo.
It was for this last publication that in 1959 he embarked on a road trip with the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini to document holidaymakers along the Italian coast. What came out of the tour was “The Long Road of Sand”, a poetic story that blended the two artists’ divergent visions of their home country.
“Pasolini was looking for a lost world of literary ghosts, an Italy that no longer existed. I was looking for an Italy looking to the future,” recalls Di Paolo at the opening of a 2021 exhibition at Galleria Carla Sozzani in Milan according to WWD. “I designed the title to signify the arduous road traveled by Italians to achieve well-being and holidays after the war.”
The 2021 show was one of many dedicated to Di Paolo’s work during the last decade of his life. Before that, few knew of his work.
Di Paolo was born in Larino, Italy, in 1925, the son of a merchant and a farmer. He grew up in poverty – an experience that would later shape his photographic eye.
In 1949, after a stint in the Italian army, Di Paolo left home to enroll at La Sapienza University in Rome. Three years later, while visiting the offices of a local magazine where he worked to pay the bills, Di Paolo spotted a Leica IIIc camera in a store window. The lure of the instrument proved irresistible: shortly after meeting, he quit his job and used his severance package to buy the camera.
Magazine assignments came in the following years, often placing him in front of bustling fashion shows and vacationing celebrities. He had a special gift for capturing intimate portraits of off-camera actresses: Sophia Loren, Kim Novak, Brigitte Bardot and Gina Lollobrigida were just a few of his subjects.
But by the second half of the 1960s, Di Paolo had become disillusioned with his industry. The straw broke the camel’s back in 1968, when a photo editor allegedly asked him to adopt the invasive and aggressive style of the paparazzi, a new trend at the time. The photographer refused and practically abandoned his camera.
It was only at the end of the 1990s that the photos of Di Paolo came back to life. One of his daughters, Silvia, was looking for a pair of skis in the family cellar when she spotted her father’s archives.
Di Paolo’s last moments came on June 12 at his home in Larino, the town where he was born nearly a century before. The Municipality of Larino announced his death on Facebook, calling the artist a “maestro” and “a precious piece of Italian photographic history”.
Fellow photographer Bruce Weber, who made a documentary about Di Paolo’s life and work in 2021, remembered his late friend in a Instagram post. “How lucky I am to have known you, to have walked with you for some time in this life,” Weber wrote. “I toast you, maestro.”
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