Franco Fontana (b. 1933, Modena) is a pioneering figure in colour photography. For more than seven decades, he has lived and worked in his native Modena, Italy, continually expanding the expressive potential of colour within the photographic medium.

Fontana is celebrated for his intense, abstracted “scapes”—landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes and bodyscapes—in which colour becomes the true subject. Whether he is photographing fields, buildings or stretches of pavement, his images transcend literal description. Saturated hues shimmer across the frame, shifting perception into a realm that feels at once abstract and poetic. Curving horizons, bands of colour and cinematic sweeps of space give his work a sense of perpetual motion; even when the eye settles, the world appears constructed from vivid planes that collide and glow on the image surface.

Working since the late 1950s, Fontana devoted himself to colour at a time when photography was dominated by a purist black-and-white aesthetic, making his research into colour both radical and singular.

Fontana has published hundreds of books in seven languages, and his work is held in major international collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo; the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; the Pushkin Museum, Moscow; the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil; FMAV, Modena; the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; and the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.