Born in Pavia in 1983, Andrea (Andy) Rocchelli graduated in Visual Design at Milan’s Polytechnic and was among the founders of Cesura in 2008. His most important photographic projects include the documentation of human rights violations in the Russian Caucasus (Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechenia); the crisis in Kirghizistan (2010) in cooperation with Human Rights Watch, and the Arab Springs in Tunisia and Libya (2011). In Italy, he mainly focused on phenomena such as “TV showgirls”, religious vocations, organised crime in Calabria, and the stories of exploited African migrants in Southern Italy’s countryside. His photographs have been published in several international media outlets such as Newsweek, Le Monde, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Novaya Gazeta, Sportweek, NZZ and Kommersant. In February 2014, he was in Kiev providing documentary evidence of protests in Maidan. In the meantime, he worked Russian Interiors, a photo book about the Muscovite female universe. Published after his death, Russian Interiors won the 2015 World Press Photo. On May 24th, 2014, Andy was killed in a mortar attack in Andreevka, in the suburbs of Sloviansk (East Ukraine), while reporting on the suffering of the civilian population caught in the grip of the conflict between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian army. His friend and travel companion, Russian journalist and human rights activist Andrey Mironov, was also killed. Since 2014, there have been individual shows of his work in San Marino, Montecarasso (Switzerland), Pavia and Rome. Rocchelli and Mironov were awarded the 2014 Kamerton Prize (Diapason), established by the Independent Union of Russian Journalists in memory of Anna Politkovskaja, to commemorate those who had distinguished themselves in defending human rights and freedom of the press.
