Fulvio Ventura’s SAGACITY

Nearly 50 years after its inception, Italian photographer Fulvio Ventura’s Sagacity is finally seeing the light of day. Begun in 1975 and originally scheduled for publication in 1978 by Luigi Ghirri’s ill-fated Punto e Virgola imprint, Ventura continued to amass his photographic archive organically for the next four decades as an open-ended project called Sagacity, Sunstar and Salamandra (a title copied from a portentous inscription discovered by chance on a brass plate in the window of a typesetter). This was Ventura’s living body of work, inspired by an evolving passion for esoteric philosophies, the mysteries of happenstance, the sound of jazz, and the literature of surrealism and mythology.

Designed by Jason Fulford, the current monograph was edited and sequenced by Giulia Zorzi of Micamera Milan, who worked closely with Ventura on the selection until his death in 2020 (at his home in Ghiffa, Italy). The images in this volume, gathered over many years in various locations around Europe, are spontaneous yet full of intention, cryptic but playful, and often strikingly cinematic – an altogether cohesive and self-contained psychic world, bound by visible and invisible energies.

64 pages, 26 x 18 cm, hardcover, The Ice Plant (Los Angeles).