Biography

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Fulvio Roiter is an important and highly respected photographer of international fame. From the end of the 1950's, when his first photographic book was printed, he caught the attention of several European editors.
He is represented in most all of the Dictionaries of Photography, not only in Italy. Fifty years ago, he came out with his first black and white photographic book on Venice, published by “La Guilde du Livre” in Losanna. This was also the first photographic book by an Italian artist. Throughout his years, he has published around seventy volumes, each with growing applause for his continual good quality images and printing.
From his association with the artistic group “La Gondola di Venezia”, to the first publication of his portfolio in the prestigious Swiss magazine “Camera” in 1954, five years pass. His Sicilian reportage exposed the world to better understanding the work of Roiter. Two years afterwards, he won the most prestigious awards given to a photographer: the Nadar award with his work, “Ombrie Terre de Saint Francois.” And, this was the beginning of an important career for the man, the artist, and Italian photography.
He was given photographic jobs and the opportunity to travel throughout the world. France, Spain, Belguim, then, Brazil, Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, Iraq. Trips that produced famous books. In particular, the many books on Venice among which “Being Venice” earned much success and remains one of the most well sold photographic books in the world. Books that as Giuseppe Prezzolini notes, “for giving as gifts, for conserving, for thumbing through in the hour in which one wants to live intensely absorbed in the mysteries of the mechanical eye, which reveals that which the natural eye can not make out or perceive.”
His photos are testimonies of his character: a brilliant man, and a bit bad-tempered, a lover of beauty and of life. And for exactly this, he occupies himself to represent life in the way, in which he lives and sees through his viewfinder. Or perhaps, how he would like to see it.

Quotes about Fulvio Roiter:

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“Fulvio Roiter is a photographer that justifies my idea that the more beautiful the photo, the more mysterious the photo. Roiter's photographs are often very beautiful. And, moreover, mysterious. Naturally, this does not hold to be true for all the photos and all photographers. For example, the instantaneous has always something to say, that makes one think …..of the death. The immortal is insignificant, the death is, instead, that which has an inevitable significance related to time. It is that which has happened. The merit of a successful photographer like Roiter is to give to us that which is.”

Alberto Moravia

“To reduce him as a photographic illustrator is an insult. He is a diviner and the diviners do not obey logic: they are arrested, the waiting hands, whatever is in front of a modest bush, well known that underneath he hides a prosperous and sprouting vein. An acute visual faculty that calls a medium; a gathering of synthesis, contrasting sentiments and extremes, the sensible nucleus of the multiplication. He writes verses through his camera, Roiter. And, as one knows, for a poet, a desolate wall, oftentimes, is more important than a basilica”.

Alberto Bevilacqua

“I believe that this monstrous, animalistic capacity of intellectual, visual concentration makes Roiter number one in the world of photography. And I say this without hesitation. It is possible that there are ones more technically refined, ones more well studied in framing, in angles, in light, in shadow, in twilight, and in gloom. But, no one knows to catch like him, above all things, a sense of existing things.”

Indro Montanelli

“He is an extraordinary type. Once and a while, he returns from a sparse angle in the world, and from his suitcase, he pulls out an incredible disorder of images, that we observe everyday. He did not photograph a television antenna, he did not photograph a car junk yard lot, he did not photograph war. For Fulvio, the twentieth century does not exist. From Umbria to Mexico, he continues his path in search for a lost secret, in search of a light, in search of human warmth, in the search of a piecing gaze, in which one could read a rediscovered innocence.”

Jean Michel Folon

“His photographs reveal a penetrating eye and soul that has the ability to choose the essentials and surprisingly catch every human expression. He had covered the world in search of that which he wanted not that that was ordinary or which the public awaited. Like every true artist, the technique accompanies the inspiration and the changes within. There is never rhetoric, nor common place in his images. His books are to be given as gifts, to conserve, for thumbing through in the hour in which one wants to live intensely absorbed in the mysteries of the mechanical eye, which makes us see that in which the natural eye can not make out or perceive.”

Giuseppe Prezzolini

“Roiter could be the brilliant conversationalist charged by memory and by citation. He could be the impetuous and extroverted friend or the cheerful fellow guest full of anecdotes. He could be the “around the world” acquaintance, that continually jumps on a plane or on a boat, that runs to Greece or to Scandinavia, in Brazil or in Mexico. But he is, above all, a poet of photography. His most true moment is that in which the eye looks in the viewfinder of his Leica. When in the four corners of the world, but preferably in his Venice and in his lagoon, he renders a sunset or a cloud, a face or a stone, to capture the images of absolute beauty.”

Carlo Sgorlon