Departures of note

Franco Fontana was born on 9 December 1933 in Cognento, near Modena, Italy. He began taking photographs in the 1950s while working as a decorator in a furniture showroom, and joined a local amateur photography club in 1961, a turning point in his career. He held his first solo exhibitions in 1965 in Turin and in 1968 in Modena, where his research into the abstract expression of color marked a decisive shift in his work at a time when photographic abstraction was largely confined to black and white.

Fontana became internationally renowned for his bold, saturated color landscapes, using telephoto lenses and distant viewpoints to flatten fields and crops into bands of intense color. His work was exhibited in more than 400 group and solo shows and is preserved in over fifty museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

He published over seventy books and worked on advertising campaigns for major brands such as Fiat, Volkswagen, Sony, Volvo, Versace, Canon, Kodak, and Swissair, and contributed to publications including Time, Life, Vogue, and The New York Times. He received numerous international awards and recognition throughout his long career. Fontana died in Modena on 29 August 2026 at the age of 92.