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In 1978, Franco Fontana’s book Skyline helped pave the way for the new Italian photography with its radicalism and typically photographic approach. This book, made in a very simple way, without excessive graphic pretensions, presenting one photograph per page, was the culmination of a work in full maturity, freed from all the tics in vogue in photographic circles, advertising or conventional photojournalism.

Skyline praised no city, no local production, it was a work closed in on itself. Starting from tangible reality, in this case the landscape, and from horizon lines, he excluded all superfluous elements to preserve the essential, the exaltation of forms and colors. Fontana codified his familiar landscapes and unknown expanses in such a way that signs, space, form, and color became the only elements of the image.

With Skyline, before Luigi Ghirri’s famous book Kodachrome and six years before Viaggio in Italia, Franco Fontana was one of the first to question the linguistic possibilities of the chromatic process and the aesthetic characteristics of photography, personally reinterpreting the world around him while initiating a new reading of the Italian landscape.

This book is based on the original Italian edition and soft cover, both in format and presentation and in the number of photographs as set by Paola and Luigi Ghirri. To improve quality, the photogravure has been redone from the slides.

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Photographs by Franco Fontana
Text by Helmut Gernsheim
Book design Paola Bergonzoni and Luigi Ghirri