“The invisible is our foundation. Think of a tree: it lives with the help of its roots, which you cannot see. That is the kind of invisible reality that I want to capture and to remove everything that is unnecessary.”
Franco Fontana is best known for his abstract color landscapes, which pare down Earth’s many elements to just green and yellow grass, blue sky, green trees and white clouds. He is considered the inventor of the photographic concept of line. Writes Giuliana Scimé in the 1982 volume of Contemporary Photographers:
“The old debate between those who argue for a pure photography and those who support freedom in the employment of the medium—that argument is settled, paradoxically, in Fontana’s work: it is a representation of the real with no technical elaboration or manipulation during the photo-chemical-mechanical process. There is just his capacity to see, to select, that enables him to extract certain elements from the immense panorama of the concrete world.”