Distant Close-Ups

Like a search-and-find book, details come to life in Vitali’s selected close-ups of his large, populous images

Italian photographer Massimo Vitali (born 1944) has always made his books as large as possible, to create ample space for the sweeping views of his photography—images that grow up to four meters wide as editioned prints. Yet even at such generous proportions, there are limits to the details we can perceive in the pages of his books. Much remains impossible to decipher: the figures in the background, the specificity of a gesture or gaze. Distant Close-Ups remedies this predicament, providing both new sight and insight into Vitali’s work.
Following Entering a New World: Photographs 2009–2018, this book comprises classic Vitali images made in 2019–23 of waterside recreation, alongside a series of people before Florence’s Duomo and swarms of concertgoers. The photographs are shown as full-page spreads, followed by close-ups of the images—unveiling as yet unseen details of the hundreds, sometimes thousands of figures Vitali captures in a single frame. We can witness the precise moment a diver’s hand breaks the water’s surface and the ambiguous, self-absorbed expression of a swimmer, floating at dusk, her eyes skyward, unaware of the camera.