From the vast landscapes of the West to the industrial fringes of New York City, Luca Campigotto’s photos offer a nostalgic and captivating vision of America.
Hailing from Venice, Luca Campigotto arrived in the United States for the very first time in 1981 at the tender age of 19. Dazzled by the country he had only known through photography and film, he felt a profound connection to a nation fueled by the mythic American Dream.
“The night I left, flying over New York, I said to myself: ‘One day I want to live here,’” he recalls. As fate would have it, in 2012, Campigotto moved to New York and immediately felt at home in a world he recognised from the work of photographers such as Weegee, Diane Arbus, and Joel Meyerowitzas well as filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Sidney Lumet.
“As a foreigner, living in the United States has always been like stepping into one of those films. At a certain point you want to become part of it,” Campigotto says. “New York has cultivated and spread its myth around the world just like my Venice did in late Middle Ages.”
Fuelled by a passion for travel photography, Campigotto set forth to photograph America’s wild landscapes, industrial areas, and cities at night. The images feel animated and alive, even though there are no people in the frame.
Describing his work as “the art of escape” into a world that he has imagined through books and period films, Campigotto crafts a cinematic tribute to an empire in decline in the new book American Elegy (Silvana).
