Lorenzo Castore is an Italian photographer whose work joins documentary attention, personal memory, and a devotion to analogue technique. Raised between Rome and Florence during the 1970s and 1980s, he belongs to a generation shaped by the legacies of Italian neorealist cinema and the photographic avant-garde, yet his practice has remained intimate and autobiographical rather than overtly political or formalist. His background in art and photography, together with his parallel activity as a filmmaker, gives him a particular sensitivity to narrative structure and the passage of time within a still image.

Castore’s visual language is defined by soft, almost tactile grain, a preference for natural light, and a deliberate resistance to the dramatic or instantaneous. He works mainly in black and white, with occasional muted colour, and favours scenes that emerge through quiet, sustained observation. His subjects include people close to him, domestic interiors, landscapes in transition, and communities on the edges of Italy and Eastern Europe. Rather than treating the camera as an instrument of extroverted reportage, he uses it to trace his own presence through encounters and moments, building what he has described as a “feeling of timelessness.”

One significant project is Ipso Facto, a series made on the volcanic island of Stromboli and connected in part with his long-running workshop there. The work treats place as a psychological terrain, bringing the island’s geological violence into contact with the everyday rituals of its inhabitants. Another important body of work is Before and After Photography (2017), presented as a panel of photographs concerned with the idea of home—“not a brick house but the one I carry inside.” Its fragmented, diaristic structure allows images to function like flashes of memory rather than stages in a linear narrative.

Castore has maintained a steady presence in European photography. In 2005 he received the Leica European Publishers Award, a recognition that helped bring his work to a wider audience through the accompanying photobook. In 2006 he was included in group exhibitions at Rencontres d’Arles. These milestones indicate his position within the medium without turning him into a mainstream celebrity. His practice encompasses still photography and moving image, while his workshops extend his intensive, place-based approach to other participants.

For photobook collectors, Castore is rewarding not only for the atmosphere of his photographs but also for the care with which images are sequenced and designed. His books reflect a belief in the physical and temporal experience of turning pages: paper, rhythm, text, and silence all become part of the work. Publications connected with the Leica European Publishers Award, along with his self-published projects, show this sustained concern for materiality. Ipso Facto and Before and After Photography offer useful entry points, demonstrating how he builds immersive narratives from fragments. His work is best approached not simply as a commodity, but as a meditation on photography’s ability to preserve the fragile experience of being somewhere, and with someone, at a particular moment.

〔PBL-BIO/2〕