H alfway through our interview, I tell Alessio Bolzoni that he is unusual: a fashion photographer without an ego. He snorts with laughter. “There’s no way you can do the work and share it with people without a bit of ego,” he says.
“But I try to talk to it and work with it.” Bolzoni’s ego has certainly been stroked recently: he worked on campaigns for brand-of-the-moment Miu Miu and took some very sweaty and sexy on-court shots of Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor to promote Luca Guadagnino’s stylish tennis film Challengers . But alongside this, the Italian-born photographer also produces artwork.
An exhibition, There’s a Fine Line Between Love and Hate, You See, opens this month at VO Curations gallery in London. Bolzoni’s work in fashion, with its awkward poses and contrasting backdrops, could be described as quirky and arty, while also making clothes look really good. By contrast, in his artwork, he goes deep with high-minded statements and references, to Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Žižek and more.
Take the diptych series Accumulo, which combines found images and newspaper pictures of people cropped to show just their legs. “My focus,” he says, “was people walking. Then I understood that the part that was interesting to me was the legs.
It was magical to find details that match perfectly – the position of the foot or the same shadow.” The title of the work refers to a wider theme for Bolzoni: the images we are now bombarded with. “It is cr.
