Co-founder & member
Luca Santese, 1985. While attending the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan he worked as an assistant in Alex Majoli’s studio, and co-founded Cesura in 2008. In 2010 he won the World Press Photo prize with his project Detroit 2009-2010, and in the same year he exhibited the project Found Photos in Detroit with Arianna Arcara at Le Bal in Paris, followed by exhibitions at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, OGR in Turin, and MoCP in Chicago. In 2012 he published the eponymous photo book with Arianna Arcara. The book, published by Cesura Publish, has collected seven nominations as best photographic book of the year and was selected by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger for the third volume of The Photobook: A History, a collection of the best photo-books published after WWII. The curatorial experience gained with Found Photos in Detroit developed in the Italy & Italy project, a book that puts together a selection of images of the city of Rimini in the 1990s. Luca recently curated an exhibition for the 125th anniversary of the Italian Touring Club Italiano, with a selection of 125 original images from the Touring archive; the exhibition was held at the Palazzo della Regione Lombardia in Milan. Santese’s work is characterised by a strong research; his experiments with documentary photography result in projects such as Realpolitik, Festa, and his most recent publication “Il Corpo del Capitano”, co-authored with Marco P. Valli: a research on the different perspectives of Matteo Salvini’s propaganda – the political leader of the Italian Lega and center-right forces – with a truthful and ironical style. Santese’s work has been published on several media outlets and exhibited in Europe, Russia, and the U.S.