Spada

Valerio (1972). Italian photographer. After secondary school, he enrolled for two years at the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia in Milan in 1994-1995 but, restless and curious, he did not attend the lectures on a regular basis and made trips abroad. In this way he visits Athens, Monaco, London, and Madrid, combining dreams, plans, and cheap boarding houses as he gravitated towards the fashion world in the hope of being able to enter it on a permanent basis. In 1995 he was given the opportunity to produce his first editorial by Down Town Magazine. In 1996, he did advertising campaigns for Renault Twingo, Telecom Italia, Levi’s, Lycia, Collistar, and Deborah, and he produced fashion editorials for the magazine Max, for which he also created a calendar. He became involved with the music scene and in particular with the singer Vinicio Capossela, whom he accompanied on tour in 2001, creating an interesting black-and-white reportage and the record cover for Canzoni a manovella. Also in 2001, with Luca Martire and Fabrizio Montana he founded the fashion and visual culture magazine Stile; he took artistic and editorial control and published many reports in it. In 2003, he became editor of the latest title, Cross. A young photographer with a rigorous and very distinctive style, Spada uses light in a highly selective way. He pays great attention to the composition, switching between showing the whole body and just details (an eye, the softness of the face, a gesture of the hand), and uses color to underline the attraction of a sensual atmosphere. As one of the most interesting photographers of his generation, he tends not to get stuck in any one particular style, but is always open to new ideas, and has thus become, in his activities also as an art director, a point of reference for other photographers.