Franco Fontana, born in Modena, Italy, is a photographer who built his career on a simple—but, at the time, radical—approach to photography: the use of color. At the time Fontana was working his way through the art world, black and white photos dominated the medium.
To see his vision come to life, he leaned hard into saturation, abstraction, and emotion. His landscapes turned into visual fields of tension and harmony. Added to this vision was his use of a telephoto lens that flattened his compositions into bands of color, resulting in photos that looked and felt more like paintings.
Fontana reduces the world to its essentials: a field, a sky, a road. The use of a telephoto lens pulls the elements into tight, compressed layers. Depth disappears. Space feels ambiguous. All that's left is form, color blocks, and geometric lines that carry weight but still feel like places you know.
His approach to landscapes isn't an isolated one. When shooting architecture, cityscapes, still life, or people, Fontana used the same disciplined focus on lines, contrast, and mood. His subjects always remain about the underlying emotional geometry.
Fontana's work opened the door for others to embrace color photography, proving that color wasn't just for advertisements. Color photography can be conceptual, poetic, and serious. His color work has a meditative feeling on space, light, and presence that's not focused on capturing reality—it's about transforming it into poetic storytelling.
Fontana once said, "Color is not reality. Color is a means of expression, a form of language." His work isn't trying to document—it's trying to evoke. There's a simplicity to them, his power of restraint to leave things out in order to communicate something deeper. In the video above from Faizal Wescott, take a deeper dive into the beautiful work of Franco Fontana.
