Luciano Rigolini
Luciano Rigolini
Questioning the Image
“Luciano Rigolini’s diverse and international career is an impressively tireless endeavour to get to grips with new languages and technologies in photography and cinema. In his teaching work and as a producer, he fostered innovation and creativity in documentary filmmaking like no one else in Switzerland. As a photographer, he is always searching for the details that turn a picture into a work of art. He has a truly masterful flair for discovering serendipitous beauty and giving any image – however banal – a new meaning, a new life.”
Federal Design Commission
Luciano Rigolini’s career has been defined as much by his work as a mediator and producer as by his own artistic output. He gained international recognition in the early 1990s with Urban Landscapes, a photographic series exploring the principles of the medium. After working as a cameraman and documentary filmmaker with the Swiss national television broadcaster, he joined the European cultural channel ARTE in Paris in 1995 and remained in charge of developing auteur films there for 20 years. Alongside his photography and research into new forms of narrative and language, he has produced films by internationally renowned directors and artists such as Laurie Anderson and Naomi Kawase. He has devoted himself entirely to vernacular photography since 2002, appropriating and reinterpreting amateur pictures and industrial documents with the aid of digital technology and machine learning. He has taught film and photography at several universities, including Rice University in Houston, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, the SUPSI in Lugano, HEAD in Geneva and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
Luciano Rigolini was born in 1950 in Tesserete (canton of Ticino) and now lives and works in Lugano (Ticino) and Paris.
