Photoshelter
In 2015 we launched the "Photo Shelter" project curated by Maria Savarese.
Every year our website hosts the photographs of an artist with whom we have come into contact in the past: in fact, it is now more than ten years that the Firm has been working alongside and supporting the work of photographers by protecting their copyright, assisting them in negotiating sales contracts, commission agreements, delivery agreements with retailers, etc.
The subject of photography is a topic dear to our firm, we have assisted several photographers in litigation (including the Cox-Marras case), and we have been collaborating since 2018 with Pixsy, an internationally active portal in the protection of photographers' copyright.
From Carlo Orsi to Giulio Parisio, from Franco Pasti to Giada Ripa, from Matteo Gastel to Gianni Fiorito, Photoshelter has now been configured for 10 years as an open archive ready to welcome the work of many other photographers significant to the Firm.
Photoshelter's mission is to merge our legal practice with our passion for photography and its consequent valorization.
Francesco Patriarca - Time Whispers in the Rose Garden of Love
Photshelter 2026 is dedicated to the photography of Francesco Patriarca.
Born in 1974 in Rome, where he lives and works, Francesco Patriarca has developed an artistic path in which life and work are inextricably intertwined. His professional training stems from personal experience—from lived moments that the artist translates into visual projects rather than individual works.
Active since the late 1990s, Patriarca has exhibited since 2002 in galleries, museums, foundations, and national and international institutions, including The Gossmichael Foundation (Dallas), The Dactyl Foundation (New York), Fondazione Pastificio Cerere (Rome), Museo dei Mercati di Traiano (Rome), Musée Carnavalet (Paris), Rencontres de la photographie en Sud Gironde, the National Gallery of Art of Tirana, MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts (Rome), MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, the Royal Palace of Caserta, and Rencontres d’Arles. His photographs, reportages, and portraits have appeared in publications such as the International Herald Tribune, Courrier International, La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale dell’Arte, The Observer, and L’Officiel.
In 2024 he published his third monograph, Clay Ghost, a project that in 2025 was presented in several exhibitions in Rome (Galleria Eddart), Paris (Galerie Yvon Lambert and Galleria Maggiore GAM), and Tbilisi (Fotografia Gallery). In 2026, two further solo exhibitions are scheduled in London (Artvisor) and New York (Coffey Street Studios).
Although he employs different languages—ranging from painting to photography, sculpture, drawing, and music—photography represents the starting point of his research.
Patriarca constructs his series as chapters of an ever-expanding experiential archive: projects born from encounters, places, or lived conditions, which the Roman artist translates into visual and mental mosaics, shifting the narrative onto a meta-temporal plane.
The title of this series of works selected for Photoshelter 2026 refers directly to the Sufi poem Gulshan-i ‘ishq (The Rose Garden of Love), written in Deccani in 1657 by the Persian Romantic poet Nusrati.
The text recounts the fantastic adventures of a prince in search of the beloved woman—never truly known, seen only in a dream. After many trials, the two lovers finally meet in the Rose Garden, a paradisiacal place and a symbol of union and peace.
The Deccani language brings together the literary and cultural traditions of India and Iran, and—as in many poetic cycles from the Middle East—the garden appears in this text as a metaphor for paradise on earth, a vessel of symbols and elements that enable humankind to attain harmony, peace, and love through spiritual quest.
In these photographs—an ideal continuation of the Clay Ghost project—Patriarca introduces floral and natural elements: a woodland, the garden where he lives and works, his roses and vases, once again portrayed, but outdoors, in the shade of a large centuries-old tree and placed on a sheet that moves with the summer breeze, commonly associated in Sufi tradition with the vital breath and dialogue with the divine. There are also plants photographed in the gardens of the mosques of Paris, Córdoba, and Damascus—the so-called chahār bāgh—echoing the ancient Persian garden traditionally divided into four sections by water channels, counterparts to the four gardens of paradise described in the Qur’an.
Vases filled with roses and landscapes of unspoiled nature lead us back to a distant, archaic time—to the idea of travel and exploration in search of the unknown, and to the call of the desert and of those places where Sufi mystical culture developed.
Maria Savarese
