About me – English version

Riccardo de Massimi was born in 1960 and has lived in Rome since he was a child.

As a teenager, he encounters the reflex, which his elder brother had just bought, and it was love at first sight.

With his brother, he also experiences the magic of the dark room: the silence and the concentration in the feeble, red light, the containers of acids, the palpitations of watching the image blossom on the sheet of paper.

Alongside this, he undertakes a path of learning in art history, with a particular interest in the works of the best painters and photographers, which continues to this day.

In those same years, along with his schooling, he begins to research the vast treasury that philosophy, religion and psychology have left as a heritage to humanity, and he passionately devours innumerable textbooks.

Once he graduates, mere conceptual knowledge no longer satisfies him. He sets off to seek the values and reasons that underlie the lives of men, the deeper motivations, the meaning with which humanity paints its life and its intents. He begins to travel extensively, to explore the globe.

Today, he has visited have the planet, and especially Africa and Asia, in search of those civilizations, societies and cultures that have not yet been overcome by the global concept; places where the sense of the divine, the ceremonies, rites and traditions, and the passages connected to them, are still deeply rooted.

This is the human context, with its anthropological vastness, in which he has pursued the photographic laboratory of his artistic activity, and which continues to this day.

Riccardo De Massimi’s photographic research, which contains idealistic references to the work of various artists in the field, has sought to capture, in gestures, emotions, gazes, those elements that, though they have been encountered in distant territories and societies, intimately concern us all.