Massimo Vitali was born in Como in 1944. He moved to London after high school, where he studied photography at the London College of Printing. In the early 1960s he began working as a photojournalist, collaborating with many magazines and agencies in Italy and Europe. In this period he met Simon Guttmann, the founder of the Report agency, who would become fundamental for Vitali's growth as a "Concerned Photographer". In the early 1980s a growing distrust in the belief that photography had an absolute capacity to reproduce the subtleties of reality led to a change in his career path. He started working as a cinematographer for television and cinema. However, his relationship with the camera never ceased and he eventually turned his attention back to "photography as a means of artistic research". His series of panoramas of Italian beaches, called the Beach Series, began in 1995, in light of drastic political changes in Italy. Vitali began to observe his compatriots very carefully. He represented a "sanitized and complacent vision of the Italian normality", at the same time revealing "the internal conditions and disturbances of the normality: its cosmetic falsity, sexual innuendos, commodified leisure, deluded sense of well-being and rigid conformity". [Whitney Davis, "How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age" in October Magazine, Summer 2006, n.117, p.71-98.] Over the past 12 years she has developed a new approach to representing the world, illuminating the apotheosis della Mandria, expressing and commenting through the most intriguing and palpable forms of contemporary art. He currently he lives in Lucca. His works are present in prestigious collections such as the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato, the Guggenheim in New York, the Metropolitan Bank Trust Photo Collection in Chicago and the Center Pompidou Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.