Filippo Venturi Photography | Blog

Filippo Venturi is a documentary photographer and a visual artist based in Italy.
He produces projects on stories and issues concerning identity and the human condition.

His work has been published in leading international magazines, such as National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Newsweek, Geo, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Stern, Internazionale, La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera and La Stampa.

He has documented several totalitarian dictatorships (highlighting with his work the artificiality with which these countries display and narrate themselves to the world), witnessed the crisis of some democracies and reported the movements fighting to protect minority rights and democracy.

For the past few years, he has been working on a project about the Korean Peninsula, earning him the Sony World Photography Award, the LensCulture Emerging Talent Award, the Il Reportage Award, the Voglino Award and the Portfolio Italia – Grand Prix Hasselblad.

His work has been exhibited in Italy and abroad at venues and festivals such as Foro Boario in Modena as ‘New Talent’ of the Modena Photography Foundation, MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Somerset House in London, U Space in Beijing, Willy Brandt Haus in Berlin, Sony Square in New York City, Copenhagen Photo Festival, Kaunas Photo Festival, Voies Off Awards at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Photo Vogue Festival, Photolux in Lucca, SI Fest in Savignano sul Rubicone, Riaperture Photofestival in Ferrara, PhMuseum Days Photo Festival in Bologna and Festival of Ethical Photography in Lodi.

He teaches photojournalism and documentary photography and leads workshops on the relationship between photography and artificial intelligence. His courses and public talks have been hosted by the University of Padova (within the History of Journalism course), Ca’ Foscari University in Venice (Radio Ca’ Foscari), the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, the Free Academy of Fine Arts of Rimini, the Malatestiana Library in Cesena, as well as various photography festivals (Copenhagen Photo Festival, Riaperture Photofestival, Biennale of Female Photography of Mantua, etc), European projects (Reconstruction of Identities, European Shaping Fair Cities project, Erasmus+ Photography for Future, etc) and cultural associations.

He has been a member of the jury in several prestigious awards like the Marco Pesaresi Award for Contemporary Photography and the Malatesta Short Film Festival.

In 2017 he was the reporter sent to North Korea by Vanity Fair Magazine.

In 2018 he was the Fujifilm Testimonial in the FIAF Project ‘The Family in Italy’.

In 2019 he was selected by SI Fest, the Photography Festival of Savignano sul Rubicone, to participate in the ‘IDE Project – Reconstruction of Identities’, funded by the European Union, which involved organizations such as the Copenhagen Photo Festival, AD HOC Gestion Cultural SL and NOOR Foundation. He also led the ‘Regeneration Lines’ photographic workshop of the Creative Living Lab project by Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage.

In 2020 he produced several works on Covid-19 which have been published worldwide.

In 2021 he led the ‘My Dear’ photographic workshop of the Shaping Fair Cities European project, which involved twenty women of nine different nationalities with the aim of pursuing Goal 5 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda: achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. He also led the ‘Citizen Lab’ photographic workshop, which involved fifty high school students, aiming to encourage their critical thinking and creativity regarding their relationship with institutions, while carrying out small documentary projects on the electoral campaign period and administrative elections.

In 2022 his work ‘Foundations of a mirage’ was nominated for the prestigious Leica Oskar Barnack Award.

In 2023 he started working with artificial intelligence, producing conceptual works that won awards in various competitions and festivals. He was selected by the Photo Vogue Festival, an event where he was also a speaker with a talk entitled ‘Broken Mirror’. A dystopian guide to crossing the border’. He curated the Seoul and Pyongyang pavilions as part of the Countless Cities Biennial Festival, where the three photographic chapters taken on the Korean peninsula (on South Korean youth, North Korean youth and North Korean defectors) were exhibited for the first time.

In 2024 he led numerous workshops and seminars exploring the relationship between photography and artificial intelligence. He was exhibited in the major exhibition Pixel Perceptions: Into the Eye of AI, which brought together an international selection of the most interesting visual artists working with artificial intelligence and explored how this new technology affects, consciously and unconsciously, our perception of the world. He was a tutor in the NEETOPIA project, aimed at young NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) who are going through a challenging phase in their lives, conducting one-to-one lessons related to the world of photography, in order to provide them with new skills and abilities to be exploited professionally.

In 2025 he was nominated Photographer of the Year by the FIAF (Italian Federation of Photographic Associations). He led the Digital Photography Workshop at the Morgagni Liceo Classico High School in Forlì, as part of a project funded by the PNRR to reduce territorial disparities and combat school drop-out.

Contacts

Web: www.filippoventuri.photography
Email: filippo.venturi@gmail.com