Years active 1958–1998 Name Marcello Geppetti | Died 1998, Rome, Italy | |
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Born 1933 Fontana Liri, Italy Occupation Reporter and photographer | ||
PROFESSIONE FOTOREPORTER - fotografie di Marcello Geppetti (TheBeatles)
Marcello Geppetti (1933–1998) was an Italian photographer.
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This is how David Schonauer, the editor in chief of American Photo magazine, described Marcello Geppetti in 1997 during an exhibition at New York's Robert Miller Gallery. The New York Times and Newsweek compare him to Cartier-Bresson and Weegee.
Two of his shots (the kiss between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and Anita Ekberg shooting arrows at the photographers) were considered among the thirty most famous photos and his name appears (is listed) next to those of Andy Warhol and Cecil Beaton.
Nevertheless, the archive of over a million photographs by Marcello Geppetti has remained largely unexplored and only a small part of its cultural and artistic potential has been exploited. This prompted the heirs to begin in 2010 a systematic rearranging of the archive.
Biography
Marcello Geppetti got started at the Giuliani and Rocca’s agency, then he worked at Meldolesi-Canestrelli-Bozzer one of the most important agency in the 1950s and 1960s. In that period he took the distressing photo of some women who throw themself into the void while the Ambassadors Hotel is on fire in Via Veneto, in Rome; the photos were so strong and intense that went all over the world.
He was a member of a group of photographers that will inspire Federico Fellini to create the character of a news photographer named Paparazzo in the film "La Dolce Vita" in 1960.
When he didn’t like working anymore as an employee, Marcello Geppetti began working as a freelance, working closely for ten years with the Momento Sera, one of the most important newspaper at that time.
During the "Dolce Vita" years he took epoch-making photographs, among the others the first Brigitte Bardot’s nude and the kiss between Liz Taylor and Richar Burton both married to others at the time, but his activity goes on over the student protest and Italian period of terrorism called "anni di piombo". However Geppetti kept on liking taking society and daily life photos.
Their photographs are published on Time Magazine, Life, Vogue, Donna Karan and are exhibited in some galleries in Rome, Milan, London, Lisbon, São Paulo, Saint Petersburg, New York, San Francisco, St. Tropez. His pictures have sold at Sotheby's auction house.
In 2010, for the fiftieth anniversary of the movie "La dolce vita", 120 pictures among the most fascinating was exhibited at National Museum of Cinema in Turin.
Geppetti took his last photo on 27 February 1998. He had taken and filed more than a million photos.