"I have chosen to stay between two levels, a narrative one and a conceptual one, where I consider the medium I use, which in turn cannot be separated from the theme of seeing. […] I use photography to tell stories through other stories, to deal with issues that from my visual angle appear to be turning points in contemporary thought and imagery. What I mean by visual angle is the result of a personal path made of encounters and exchanges with people and readings, constellations of meaning, references to the authors we choose as companions for the journey."

Paola Mattioli 


Paola Mattioli was born in Milan in 1948. She studied philosophy with Enzo Paci, an important representative of Existentialism in Italy who introduced her to the thought of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Mattioli graduated with a thesis on the language of photography. At the same time she became an assistant to Ugo Mulas who, as she herself stated, “taught her to see”, and to whom she submitted the writings of Merleau-Ponty that would play a fundamental role in the origin of the Verifiche [Examinations], a work reflecting on the special statute of photography, Mulas’s main endeavour during his last years. Thanks to him Mattioli gained the awareness that a photograph is the result of the exploration of reality, at the same time revealing its presence and the “irreducible otherness”.

The series of portraits of Giuseppe Ungaretti from 1970 – then published by Vanni Scheiwiller together with the letters between the poet and Enzo Paci – inaugurated her experimentation with photography, initially essentially focused on portraits and documenting the student movement protests. 

Beginning in 1973 she worked on the series Cellophane, images of spaces covered by opaque sheets of plastic "blocking a complete view, becoming a metaphor of perception tout court".

Her first important exhibition was the show Le immagini del no [Images of no], held in 1974 at the Galleria Diaframma in Milan, directed by Lanfranco Colombo. The artist displayed five sequences, one of which in colour, documenting the social and political realities linked to the referendum on divorce in Milan. Between 1975 and 1976 she collaborated with the University and the Art History Institute of Milan, holding seminars on photography. During this period Mattioli also collaborated with magazines, art galleries and advertising agencies. 

In 1977 Mattioli was invited to participate with Sicof, where she presented the series Faccia a faccia – sette donne allo specchio [Face to face – seven women before a mirror]. The series of pictures was published the following year in the book Ci vediamo mercoledì. Gli altri giorni ci immaginiamo [We’ll see each other on Wednesday. The other days we’ll imagine ourselves]. This work was the result of a collective effort by the so called “Wednesday group” that counted among its members Adriana Monti, Bundi Alberti, Diane Bond, Esperanza Nuñez, Mercedes Cuman, Silvia Truppi. Here, aside from Faccia a faccia [Face to face], based on the analysis of the relationship with the reflection of her image, Mattioli presents two more photographic themes: Sara è incinta [Sara is pregnant] a sequence exploring the meaning and the ways of representing maternity, and Autoritratto [Selfportrait], an analytical and reflexive work centred on the experience of seeing and photographing. The book also contains the sequence Diana (1977), portraying the American actress Diane Bond reflected in the mirror while taking off a white mask. 

Mattioli always had a strong political awareness and beginning in the mid ‘70s became actively involved in feminist initiatives, in fact her work was closely related to the philosophy of difference.

Between 1977 and 1980 she collaborated with the monthly publication "Grattacielo" and "La Repubblica" submitting reviews of photography exhibitions. During this period she produced the work Jouissance, composed of seven small photographs portraying the faces of seven women having an orgasm, taken from pornographic magazines, placed opposite the picture of a man taken at the exit of a porn cinema in 1979. Her visual research is a meditation on the sense and the conceptual implications of the acts of photographing, looking, seeing. 

In the '80s she completed the series Statuine [Little Statues] (1985), a series of pictures of women portrayed in a fixed stillness that evokes sculpture. Their bodies are hidden by a black velvet drape from which only the face and the neck emerge. The look in their eyes is a "gaze not looking at you, exchanging nothing with the observer, it’s frozen, it denies itself". In the 1995 series Donne irritanti [Irritating women], Mattioli’s first editorial project, the true subject is "the vision in which denial, subtraction and removal play a fundamental role".

In 1996 the artist won the Kodak European Gold Award for Italy, a Hasselblad camera made of gold.

A central theme in Mattioli’s work is the awareness of an image’s partiality, underlined by a “subtle distance” reached with the use of irony and a “precise visual design” that with editing "takes the image towards new possibilities of meaning".

In 2005 Mattioli worked on the series Shanghai Express, photographs of the “dancing” shadows of the artist’s hands “playing” with the profile of a camera while preparing to shoot. In 2006 and in 2009 she undertook two projects on the theme of work: the exhibition Fabbrico (the title comes from the name of a town) was based on an inquiry on social conditioning created by work patterns in factories. In it the artist positions images of emblematic places next to portraits of people posing. The series Dalmine was the result of a project carried out three years later in a steelwork plant. The artist compares workers of the past and of the present, pictured next to machinery, and concentrates on the power of fire perceived as a disruptive force. 

The book Mémoires d’Afrique, published in 2013, presents the last stop of a series of journeys to Africa made with Sarenco, where among others the Signares pictures are published for the first time – richly dressed Senegalese women posing as the African lovers of European men during the Colonial era – and the suggestive portraits of Neri Bianchi [White Blacks]. 

The artist lives and works in Milan.