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The time: There was a time when photography changed both form and substance at one stroke. For an art (or craft) with more than a hundred years of history it was a revolution and revolutions are not gala dinners: they obligate change. It was the Noughties (the 2000’s) when some photographers began to impress their clicks on memory cards, "writing them" in the form of computer files, rather than on the usual, reassuring films.
| Digital photography, born some time before, was just then acquiring its own qualitative dignity. Many feared that this new approach could take away the documentary value from the photographs, easily manipulable by software. Unfounded objection: whatever the method of image acquisition, the electronics allows the obtaining of digital files from a negative (or slide) and perfect negatives (or slides) from digital files. The problem is not technical, but rather one of culture, trust and ethics. |
Others were concerned about the reliability of storage systems: the negative, slide, were regarded as eternal (if properly preserved), while digital files were considered unreliable because of their immateriality.
Correct? No: the digital allows infinite replication without any loss of quality (which is impossible with the chemical photograph) and eternity can proceed right from here, from the multiplication of the archives that reduces the risk that something may be lost. Although culture, trust and ethics are always involved here too. |  |
The diaphragm: the diaphragms of history, those that open and close in the border years between old and new ages, often favor the implementation of ideas.
In 1998 Francesco Paolo Mazza was 21 years old, just old enough to internalize intuition and reckless intrepidness effortlessly. Photographer and motorcycle racer, he had a passion for the racetrack: he frequented it on Sunday, being a little bit here and a little there in relation to the lens. Pilots love to be photographed in action, he also loved to photograph them. And very soon he began selling some of his photos.
The arrival of digital photography speeded things up. The speed of the photo and the speed of the motorbike met and something happened that until shortly beforehand would have been hard to imagine: it was possible to portray the pilots in action and give them the printouts almost as soon as they returned to the pit and took off their helmets.
Everything worked perfectly and so Francesco Paolo decided to find work: Fotosport.biz was born that way.
The first step was finding a home, in the form of a motor home that was at first a van and then a mobile home, and then another, and then a third even larger still. While that mobile home was travelling to the circuits throughout all of Europe, a real office with an entrance door overlooking the paddock of Vallelunga Autodromo, the "racetrack of Rome", also came into being. «Click on the image to zoom in, click to close image, click and drag to move. Use arrow keys for next and previous.»
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The fire: The engagements of teams deployed in different leagues and companies were soon added to the original work focused on amateur riders, then four-wheel vehicles were added to the two, while the images were merged into an archive that soon became too large (half a million shots per year) in too short a time so that the qualitative leap might be thereby jeopardised.
Fotosport.biz had by now become a true and proper bank of self-produced images that, compared to similar realities, had the advantage of starting up already “in the digital age”: it was natural to offer customers other opportunities, ranging from videotelevisive production systems to archival systems manageable remotely. Today Fotosport.biz is based on the work of about thirty people including staff and collaborators, organized according to the principle of synergy oriented toward quality. The same quality that we tried to offer from the beginning, when digital photography had just begun to allow it, and that has always remained the focal point of the agency’s policy management.
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At the beginning it was the paddock, the pilots, the photos, the motorbikes. |
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