What is a photographer’s talent, if not the ability to isolate rectangles of reality? The ability to encapsulate one’s experiences, one’s knowledge, within a frame. According to Calvino, talent only manifests itself once, at a particular moment of one’s life that often coincides with youth.
Francesco Loliva discovered his talent during his university years, when he started taking photographs using a well-known Russian camera. More than thirty years have passed, and he has never stopped photographing. Across the years, Loliva has constantly put his talent to the test. In his case, one should speak of ‘careers’ (in the plural, rather than a single and homogeneous career).
Loliva has worked in very different fields of photography, but there is a remarkable consistency in his style and artistic philosophy. In addition to photographing the landscapes of his beloved Apulia, he has worked in travel photography and has made anthropological reportages, masterfully using colour
as well as black and white.
What is immediately striking about his work is the extreme sharpness of his images, a quality that characterizes all of his output. Thus, clouds, olive tree barks, and sea ripples fill his photographs like fine embroidery, like knots in a precious carpet.
