People of Lentini 1972-1980

Studio portraits of the people of Lentini, near Siracusa in eastern Sicily, made by the photographer Franco Lanteri between 1972 and 1980 and read today as a collective picture of a place and a period.

Salvatore Lanteri selected the images from his father's studio archive, which runs from 1967 to 1990 and covers nearly everyone in town. He limited the selection to these years to favour younger sitters. The portraits were made with a view camera on 6x9 cm negatives, lit in the studio and retouched by hand, and a single sitting could take days. The sitters turn in near three-quarter profile with averted gazes, a look that departs from present-day rules for identity photographs. The book runs in three parts, with every face turned left, then to the centre, then right, and pages are laid out along the axis of the nose.

Franco Lanteri learned the trade by doing, working in a provincial Southern Italian town on weddings, baptisms and birthdays, on identity photographs, and on press photography for the newspaper La Sicilia. The book was published in Milan by a+mbookstore edizioni in 2017, with Colli Publishing Platform of Rome.