Bellati

Manfredi Bellati (1937) was an italian photographer. Born in Belluno, he grew up and studied in Venice, where he learned painting and sculpture with his uncle Valerio Bellati, and where he enrolled in the school of architecture. After a period of study in Leeds, he returned to Italy where he worked as an architect on domestic interiors and became familiar with photography in order to document his work. Developing a strong passion for the camera, he worked with Domus and Architectural Review on photos of interiors, and with Vogue, for which he did portraits of actors, writers and directors. With the support of Roberta di Camerino, he entered the world of fashion, lived in the swinging London of the 1960s, worked on the magazine Queen and on the English edition of Vogue. Back in Italy in 1972, he published in the most important fashion magazines. He did campaigns for Marelli, Contax, Campari, and Coin (for which he won the 1980 Clio Award), and presented his work in several personal and collective exhibits. He also knows how to make jokes with fashion, as he showed with Revivals, the book-catalogue named after the exhibit in which he posed very young and scantily-clad models among symbols of the 1950s and ’60s: the Vespa, the juke-box, the red dispensing machine for Coca-Cola, the battery-operated gas pump, a Beatles record, and Nabokov’s book Lolita along with a lollipop and the heart-shaped glasses worn by the model.