Angelo Cricchi

Born in Rome in 1961, Italian photographer, filmmaker and creative director Angelo Cricchi has built a career spanning fashion, contemporary art and visual storytelling. After a long career as a professional athlete, he turned to photography, working with international magazines and creating fashion editorials and celebrity portraits. In 1997, he co-founded Lost&Found with Susanna Ferrante, a production company working across photography, advertising and film. Through the company, Cricchi created campaigns for brands including Gucci, Kenzo, Miss Sixty, Max Mara and Antonio Marras, while contributing to publications such as D di Repubblica and Elle Italia. Alongside this commercial work, he developed a personal artistic practice that allowed him to move beyond the conventions of fashion photography, using staged images to investigate identity, desire and the stories attached to familiar cultural figures.

A significant part of Cricchi’s artistic work examines how women have been represented throughout the history of photography and visual culture. This interest came into focus with Gloomy Sunday, presented at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna in 2009. The series comprises 50 imaginary portraits of women who died by suicide, including figures such as Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo and Edie Sedgwick, alongside fictional characters. Cricchi reconstructs their final moments through carefully staged scenes, drawing on existing photographs, biographies and cultural narratives to create his own interpretations. These are not documentary portraits, but imagined encounters with women whose lives and deaths have become part of the collective imagination. By bringing these figures into a constructed photographic setting, Cricchi explores the relationship between the person, the image that survives them and the stories through which they continue to be remembered.

In Misty Beethoven Erotic Parade, Cricchi turns his attention to the history of erotic imagery and the ways desire has been represented in art, literature and popular culture. The series consists of 30 photographs inspired by figures and references including Lolita, Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus and Lili de Maupin. Rather than illustrating these references directly, Cricchi uses them as starting points for a personal visual interpretation of sexuality, fantasy and attraction. Shown alongside Gloomy Sunday, the project forms part of a wider investigation into the relationship between Eros and Thanatos, the forces of desire and death. The two series approach these subjects from different directions, but both draw on established cultural images and transform them through staged photography. The result is a body of work that considers how collective ideas about femininity, beauty and desire are created, repeated and reimagined.

Cricchi’s practice extends beyond still photography. Since 2001, he has directed short films, documentaries, art videos and fashion films, bringing his experience in fashion image-making into moving-image work. His projects have been exhibited at museums, galleries and private institutions in Italy, the Netherlands, France and Austria, including Tears of Eros in Milan and Misty Beethoven Erotic Parade in Rome.

His wider photographic projects demonstrate the range of subjects he has pursued throughout his career: I fiori dell’Atlis features portraits of Olympic athletes, Ignoto a me stesso presents portraits of artists, Il mio cuore messo a nudo focuses on female nudes that retain their imperfections, and The River brings together images made along some of the world’s great rivers. These projects move between portraiture, the body and the natural environment, revealing a practice that is not confined to a single subject or photographic genre.

Alongside his work as a photographer and filmmaker, Cricchi has maintained an active role in publishing and creative direction. He oversaw the launch of Mia le Journal magazine between 2013 and 2017 and is currently creative director of FLEWID – the book, an international publication launched in 2017 that approaches fluidity through art, photography and fashion. He is also involved with IRÆ, an editorial project focused on sustainability and the environment. These projects place his work within broader conversations about identity, contemporary culture and the role of visual media.

Cricchi’s career has developed through an ongoing exchange between commercial commissions and independent artistic research, allowing him to work across different formats while continuing to question how images shape our understanding of people, bodies and the world around us. Based in Rome, Cricchi continues to work across photography, film and creative direction.