Photoshelter
In 2015 we launched the "Photo Shelter" project.
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 almost 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.
Alfa Castaldi
Alfa Castaldi was a key player and reference in Italian photography from the 1950s until his death in December 1995.
Born in Milan, a favorite pupil of Roberto Longhi in Florence, Alfa in the early 1950s abandoned the idea of a commitment to art history to take up photography.
Returning to Milan, he began attending from 1954 to 1961 the Jamaica bar in the Brera district, a circle of intellectuals, painters, writers and journalists, documenting, thus, the rebirth of Italian cultural life, new forms of pictorial expression, writers, journalism and began to devote himself to reportage: southern Italy, Paris, Algeria, London.
Working for several weeklies and monthlies, including "L'Illustrazione Italiana" directed at the time by Livio Garzanti and later by Pietro Bianchi, "Settimo Giorno" of which Guido Rocca was editor-in-chief and, occasionally, "Oggi" and "Le Ore," he produced, especially for the first two magazines, reports in Italy with a socio-cultural slant and abroad, reporting on Paris, French colonization in Algeria, London, anti-nuclear demonstrations in England, northern Europe, and Le Corbusier's architecture in France.
In 1958 he met Anna Piaggi, then a contributor to "Annabella" magazine, a decisive meeting for both of them, with whom he would begin an uninterrupted working and living relationship, marrying her in 1962.
At the end of the 1960s Alfa opened his first photographic studio in Milan where, following the constant thread of his multifaceted interests and curiosities, he would devote himself to fashion photography, beginning an important collaboration with "Vogue Italia" and in general with all the magazines of the Condè Nast group, maintaining, however, always a careful "look" towards current affairs reportage, alternating fashion with collaborations with weekly magazines such as "Panorama" and "Espresso."
Alfa Castaldi's is a cultured photography and with extraordinary ability he has moved on multiple fronts, from reportage to fashion, from still life, to specific portraits, to photos of Parisian graffiti in the 1980s, and then nudes, street photos, and cities.
These photographs presented for Photoshelter 2024 were taken by Castaldi during several trips he made between 1955 and 1988, in Italy, including Sardinia, Naples, Viareggio, Milan at the Jamaica bar, and abroad, London, Paris, including those of Quais de la Seine, taken in 1959 from a Bateaux Mouche sailing on the river and later published in the magazine "Imago," a portfolio for photographers and designers of the 1950s and 1960s.
Maria Savarese
