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ARTIST STATEMENT
I photograph the body because it is the place where human beings gradually lose the ability to lie. The body physically bears the marks of our history; it changes over time, moves through space, acts and is acted upon, feels and makes us feel.
It is the site of our identity, our desires, and our fears, but also of what lies beyond our control.
We can choose what to say, how to appear, and what image of ourselves to project; the body, however, continues to reveal us.
The body never lies.
My work emerges from the tension between control and the loss of control.
I photograph with a direct, almost forensic gaze, without seeking to beautify, eroticize, or reassure.
Black and white, direct flash, strong contrast, grain, details, and close-ups create a visual language that rejects the aesthetic distance through which the body is so often represented.
Photographing conventionally beautiful bodies is easy when beauty conforms to an already established ideal; I am interested in what that ideal tends to exclude.
I explore sexuality, desire, pain, pleasure, identity, diversity, and freedom, particularly in territories that dominant morality regards as marginal.
In an age when the sexualized body is constantly present as an image, yet risks being experienced less and less as a lived reality, I seek the real body: vulnerable, imperfect, physical, animal.
I often remove the face.
The body thus loses its individual identity and becomes the body of everyone and no one: a collective language that evokes the idea of a shared unconscious.
I want the viewer to be able to recognize themselves, to step back, or to feel disturbed.
Discomfort is not a side effect of the image; it is part of the work.
It arises from confronting something that belongs to all of us, and that we often prefer not to see.
My work is inseparable from who I am.
My experiences, traumas, desires, fears, impulses, and obsessions inevitably enter the work.
I photograph the world in an attempt to find myself: every PERSON I encounter becomes part of a collection through which I explore, outside myself, what I continue to search for within.
BIO
Daniele Vannini was born in Milan in 1984, where he lives and works.
He grew up within a highly restrictive religious environment that placed limitations on his relationship with the body, sexuality, desire, curiosity, difference, and the freedom to question what he was taught.
Photography entered his life in 2008, during a period marked by frequent panic attacks. That year, he began taking photographs with an old Nokia mobile phone.
He immediately understood that photography was the language through which he wanted to enter into other people’s stories while, at the same time, exploring himself.
In 2010, he began his professional career in photojournalism, publishing in newspapers and magazines including la Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, il manifesto, l’Unità, Internazionale, and many others.
However, his desire to delve deeper into the stories he encountered soon brought him up against the limitations of a system increasingly driven by the speed and superficiality of news.
He turned to studio portraiture while developing a personal practice through which he explored subjects including vegetative states, gender dysphoria, sexuality, and the BDSM environment.
In 2016, he established the visual language that continues to define his work today: stark black and white, direct flash, high contrast, and a radically unadorned approach.
At the same time, he came to understand that commercial photography could not fully contain his identity as a photographer.
He sought to adapt to his clients’ needs, yet continued to feel restless, questioning the boundaries of his role and repeatedly returning to his personal practice.
In 2023, his encounter with internationally renowned photographer Settimio Benedusi confirmed an awareness that Vannini had already been cultivating for years:
For him, photography is not simply a profession, but a way of being in the world.
Today, his practice emerges from encounters with others and from the need to explore himself through them.
He recognizes himself in others, and finds others within himself, using the bodies and lives of the people he photographs as a space in which to affirm freedom, curiosity, and openness toward what society tends to marginalize.