Rizzo Collection #43

Alberto arrived in NYC in 1965 to follow his passion as a Fashion photographer. Moving away from straight point and shoot images, he sought to change the way people saw fashion and beauty photography. Alberto’s early fashion work makes use of this by breaking away from his contemporaries and creating a sense of theatre, dance, and beauty that speak through his photographs, and border on the sublime. His painting, design, and graphic art background at the Accademia delle Bella Arti di Brera, Milan, as well as his training as a classical ballet dancer influenced much of his work. These inspirations are exemplified by his use of silhouettes, shadows, and illustrative elements in his early fashion photography.

In the mid ‘80s Alberto had a studio in NYC on Mulberry and Grand where the top floor was used as a workspace. He would often sit at the corner window in the afternoons and watch people on the street. This was the inspiration for what would become a 10-year journey of “Shadow Series” photographs. Every day at 4pm, Alberto would photograph the shadows of people going about their business from his perch above - this imbued the photographs with a duality rarely seen in life imitating art.

Alberto’s inspiration for the “Cut Out Paper Series” was oddly enough, a chance occurrence of a roll of calculator paper falling onto the floor into the sunlight. This would lead to his fascination with cutting and forming paper into the abstract art you see in the beautiful images that continued to evolve as a series for decades. Alberto would turn seamless paper into cut outs of human forms and place them in reverse shadow boxes to later photograph. This work expanded as he began incorporating his existing photographs, playing with colors and layering in his darkroom and combining the images into truly surreal art.

Alberto’s illustrious career as a photographer and artist spans nearly 40 years and has evolved from his early Fashion work, to the Shadow Series, through the Paper Cut Out Series, to his fine art paintings. Throughout his lifetime, Alberto would experiment with many different mediums, concepts, and styles spanning into both analogue and digital - all of which has led to The Rizzo Genesis Collection, a representation of his finest works using all of these original concepts and musings.

Shadow 2 - Although Alberto shot tons of film in the Shadow Series, he edited the images down to a very small number of monumental images that resonated with him. This image has us wondering why the figure is adamantly talking to himself on the street. This was the second photograph of the 10 year series, shot in 1989.