Maria Vittoria Backhaus (Milan, 1942 – Rocchetta Tanaro, 2025) studied set design at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts; during those years she frequented the legendary Bar Jamaica, a focal hub of the Milanese art scene. She began her career in the second half of the 1960s as a photojournalist. In the early 1980s she started collaborating with L’Uomo Vogue and Casa Vogue, and from then on she specialized in still life, fashion, and design photography, immediately developing an original and transgressive style, approaching the world of fashion with an ironic and critical eye.>
For Maria Vittoria, photography is a means of documenting reality.>
Talent, confidence of taste, mastery of lighting, and an inexhaustible creativity—supported by her training in set design—led her to create elaborate and surprising sets, defining the unique style of this icon of Italian photography.>
With a gaze always attentive to contemporaneity, current events, and ongoing social changes, Maria Vittoria Backhaus reshaped the rules of fashion, still life, and design photography, focusing less on the object being portrayed than on what an image can convey to the viewer.

Trained in painting, Irene Kung has adopted photography as the primary medium of her artistic production, drawing on her background not only to enhance the lyrical and emotional dimension of her artistic research, but also its gestural and instinctive aspects. The essential nature of her framing and her ability to bring her subjects out of darkness express a stylistic and conceptual affinity with the Italian Renaissance: her works highlight a rational desire to identify new possible paths toward a sustainable future and a renewed attention to the balance between the human and the natural.
"In my project on trees, I portray trees as dreamlike presences: solitary, strong, and essential.
A single tree on the top of a hill
endures and lives according to its own laws.
It teaches us the fundamentals of life and grants us peace."" (I.K.)

Riccardo Scibetta (born 1971) graduated in architecture in Palermo in 1999 and then worked for two years designing and creating interior furnishings, a monument in a public square, painting performances, graphic design. Since 2000, he has devoted himself to photography, collaborating with specialized magazines. In 2001, he won the Festival of Savignano. From 2003 to 2005, he was part of the Grazia Neri photographic agency; in 2003, he also received a special mention in the FNAC photographic talent competition, and in 2005 he won the Yann Geffroy competition.
"Due (Two) is a project I have been working on for years. It is the result of continuous research and constant production, an attempt to capture an image that I have found increasingly difficult to find around me: the gesture of holding hands. Perhaps this is why, the further I went with the project, the more I had to go back to find it. This is the story of that search and of that rediscovery. (R.S.)