My Story

I've spent the last thirty years learning how to wait for a moment that doesn't yet exist.

That's the job, whether I'm on a commercial set for Ogilvy, Armani, Loewe, or Heineken, or standing alone at first light somewhere far from any client brief. The discipline is the same — read the light, read the moment, and don't press the shutter until the frame tells the truth.

I split my life between New York and Sardinia, and I think that tension shows up in the work: the density and drive of one place, the stillness and horizon of the other. I've carried a camera across six continents chasing that same feeling — the Arctic, Lapland, the Atacama desert, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Buenos Aires, Tokyo. Some of those frames became campaigns. Others just became mine.

My visual language owes a lot to cinema more than photography — Terrence Malick's patience, Sofia Coppola's quiet, Scorsese's tension, the cool control of a Bond film. And to Paolo Roversi, who taught me that stillness can hold more drama than motion ever could.

The prints in this store are the images I couldn't leave behind — the ones that kept working on me long after the shoot ended. Each one is printed by hand, on archival paper, the same way I'd want to receive a piece of my own work: honestly, and built to last.

— Francesco