Photography Archives

There are many ways to celebrate a collaboration that has been lasting for 30 years. We have chosen to do so by fueling the creativity fire: with the gaze of Gianluca Vassallo, artist-photographer, on Ferruccio Laviani’s sculptural lamps.

With Notturno Laviani, Gianluca Vassallo interprets the lamps that Ferruccio Laviani has been designing for Foscarini since 1992. The project is built on an idea of light that the artist imagined while listening to a song: a very Italian light that he featured in its dual intimate and public guise.

Notturno Laviani is a tale organized in episodes. Fourteen shots where lamps inhabit alien spaces: significant environments where the distance between objects and context multiplies meanings. The viewer is thus brought to seek personal interpretations around an imaginary of light that belongs to all of us but that we all see with our personal sensibility.

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30 Years of Orbital
— Foscarini Design stories
Creativity & Freedom

Download the exclusive e-book Foscarini Design stories — 30 years of Orbital and learn more about the collaboration between Foscarini and Laviani.
A fertile interchange, based on elective affinities, extending across three decades as a pathway of mutual growth.

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There’s a new skyscraper in town: the light. For NYCxDESIGN Festival 2022 Foscarini pays homage to the Big Apple and its unmistakable skyline with the photography project “The City of Light”.

Once again Foscarini chooses the art of photography to narrate its evolution and its products. During Design Week 2022 in New York Foscarini presents “The City of Light”, an original photography project by Gianluca Vassallo and Francesco Mannironi where the protagonist is UpTown, the sculptural floor lamp by Ferruccio Laviani that pays homage – starting with the name – to the most inimitable skyline in the world: that of Manhattan.

A lamp-sculpture, a skyscraper of light with a presence of great impact, Uptown is a composition of three volumes made with plates of tempered, coloured and screen-printed glass, in the primary colours yellow, red and blue, superimposed to generate intense chromatic effects.
An illustration of Foscarini’s experimental approach, Uptown has been interpreted in a totally off-scale version, inserted at some of the most recognizable locations in the city: Greenpoint, Wall Street, Broadway, Midtown….

The photographs reveal the particular identity of Uptown, based on transparency, a red thread that has guided every choice in the design development, like the 45° ground edges that make the meeting of the glass plates imperceptible. That which goes unseen, and seems to be quite absent, has been hidden intentionally: what remains is an impression of simplicity, for an immediate interpretation of an object of great complexity. Striking even when not in use, Uptown becomes an absolute protagonist of spaces when it is turned on. The LED light source with dimmer is concealed in the base: when the lamp is on, the plates are filled with colour, and the light is projected upward. Uptown is a lamp of vivid personality, a case of extraordinary charisma that defines its surroundings with its forceful presence.

After selection for the ADI Design Index 2021, making the project eligible to compete for the Compasso d’Oro Award, an important new chapter begins in the spring of 2022 for VITE (LIVES), the multimedia production by Foscarini, with distribution by Corraini in the world’s finest bookstores starting in May 2022.

Corraini and Foscarini have once again joined forces to distribute VITE (LIVES), a story told in images, videos and words to explore different interpretations of the home, the relationship with light, the link between life in the home and the space outside. The publisher and the decorative lighting brand share in an attitude of experimentation and constant research, as seen in the creation of the book-zine Inventario. Corraini will now also distribute the VITE project by Foscarini in the outstanding bookstores of its network around the world.

VITE is a fascinating publishing initiative with which Foscarini talks about light, starting not with the company’s lamps – the people who design, develop and produce them – but with the individuals who live in the spaces brightened by those lamps.

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Presented in 2020 and selected for the ADI Design Index 2021, VITE (LIVES) is a voyage that takes us to cities in the North, South, East and West, inside real lives of real people – guided by artist, photographer and videomaker Gianluca Vassallo and writer Flavio Soriga. In the photo and video series, people are at the centre of the visuals and the narration, allowing viewers the freedom to roam vicariously inside personal spaces, real spaces that are approachable and imperfect. This time, Foscarini no longer looks at carefully controlled environments, “aspirational” images of photographic sets, but rather at homes that are lived in on an everyday basis, and close-ups of the people who dwell in them.

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On display at the brand’s New York flagship showroom, Foscarini narrates this human-centric vision by offering a setting to experience the photographic works with accompanying lighting designs.

Discover more about VITE project

VITE represents a change of vision and a shifted perspective for the lighting brand Foscarini – an evolution in the way the company references and visualizes its products. VITE reflects a desire to make people the central focus of the narrative about design. The project discusses light, not from the perspective of the lamp, who designed, developed, and produced it, but from the perspective of those who live with it inside their own spaces, in their homes.

On display at the brand’s New York flagship showroom, Foscarini narrates this human-centric vision by offering a setting to experience the photographic works with accompanying lighting designs.
Products on display include Lumiere by Rodolfo Dordoni, Gregg by Ludovica+Roberto Palomba, MITE Anniversario and Twiggy by Marc Sandler, Plena by Eugenio Gargioni and Guillaume Albouy, Sun – Light of Love by Tord Boontje, Caboche by Patricia Urquiola and Eliana Gerotto, Aplomb by Lucidi Pevere and Spokes by Garcia Cumini.

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Visitors are taken through the various scenes, as they are transported inside real homes in Copenhagen, New York, Naples, Shanghai and Venice by Gianluca Vassallo (artist, photographer and videographer) and Flavio Soriga (writer). The central focus of the images is not the products but the human beings, leaving viewers to gaze into and roam around the private spaces of the individuals. Not the seemingly unreachable and highly-stylized homes of typical interior shoots, VITE depicts homes that are lived-in in their everyday settings.
The VITE exhibition highlights Foscarini’s shift in viewpoint towards showcasing their lights in a more intimate, private dimension, in spaces where lamps are inserted in a very natural way as part of the experience of real people in their own homes.

“Every time the door opened into one of the lives I photographed in recent months, I pursued a Sunday some forty years ago, that I guard within me. I looked for the wonder of that particular light that I experienced at the age of six, in a brand new house, with the smell of the fresh paint welcoming us and the noise coming from the floor above us. That was simply the light I imagined shone on the life of the people who lived up there.”

GIANLUCA VASSALLO
/ AUTHOR

The VITE project will be on display from now until May 2022 at the Foscarini Spazio Soho Showroom, the brands New York flagship showroom.
You can also visit the Exhibition from anywhere in the world, 24/7 through our special Virtual Tour.

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Featuring colour slides and period images, the photographic project by Massimo Gardone for Foscarini takes us on a journey in time, thanks to a lamp and its light.

“It’s always a matter of intuition”: the photography project created by Massimo Gardone for Foscarini stems from an intuition and takes form through his poetic gaze, thanks to a small lamp with simple, essential lines, inserted in legendary locations and situations.
Black and white fragments wrested from time, with all their fascinating charm, come back to life thanks to a virtual and virtuous overlay of images, using slides to create a sector of colour ignited by a luminous touch: that of Birdie Easy, the lamp created for the contract market, which in the poignant interpretation of the photographer transports scenarios from the past into the present.

“When Foscarini asked me to interpret the locations for the new Birdie lamps, the idea arose of inserting them in historic tableaux, evocative period settings. It was like lighting a fuse. But it was not until I imagined seeing the gaze of Joan Holloway, from the series Mad Men, in the young woman seated on a chair on the tenth floor of the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow, in an image shot in 1966, that I understood how the atmosphere of those precious black and white images could be the right one: our narrative starts here, by utilizing photographs from an exceptional archive of images”.

MASSIMO GARDONE
/ PHOTOGRAPHER

Massimo Gardone’s project thus becomes a sequence of captured moments taken from the historic Bridgeman Images archive, which take us back into New York at the turn of the last century, passing – as the years progress – from the lounge of the Knickerbocker Hotel to the veranda of the Park Avenue Hotel or the lounge of the White Hotel, and then reaching London, in the reading room of the YMCA, a room in the Copley Plaza Hotel of Boston in 1937, all the way to a visit to a suite in the Oriental Hotel of Bangkok, in the 1980s.
On the vintage black and white pictures, a 6×6 slide has been superimposed, to imagine Foscarini products inserted in that same original setting.

“As if by magic, in that little square light fills the scene, colours find their way amidst the greys, the alchemy between analogue and digital suddenly happens. Every image is a film, every image makes us fly, arriving elsewhere”.

MASSIMO GARDONE
/ PHOTOGRAPHER

A photography project by Gianluca Vassallo for Foscarini brings some of the company’s lamps into the streets of Stockholm, Milan, New York.

The photographic project “Postcards of Light” took shape in occasion of 2017 Stockholm Furniture Fair, when Foscarini asked Gianluca Vassallo to take design to the streets: a different way of narrating the company’s presence in the cities of design through some of its most-loved models.
Lamps become protagonists and witnesses of the fragments of life brought by every passer-by.

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“A postcard to bear witness to the joy of having been there, in the world, of having been there in the heart. Expressing the desire for someone, at any latitude, someone who is sharing the good fortune of being in the world with me now, at this moment, to be able to feel the grace with which I try to cross it, accompanied in each of my voyages by the light of the world and by the light Foscarini attempts to add, the light made by men, the light Foscarini gives to them. With the hope that just one, even, of the many who pass lightly over the present, will feel the desire to write on the back of these images: thanks for having given me light.”

GIANLUCA VASSALLO
/ ARTIST

An art project designed by Gianluca Vassallo that provides photographic documentation of the subtle relationship that can arise between two strangers when they are invited to look one another in the eyes under the arch of Twiggy.

More than 120 shots for more than 120 encounters between people, strangers up to that moment, under the arch of the Twice as Twiggy lamp. The iconic lamp, designed by Marc Sadler and proposed in a giant version, plays the starring role of the public spaces of a black and white New York City with a decidedly timeless charm, defining an appealing area that is at the same time the boundary of a possibility.

The artist Gianluca Vassallo put together and caught on camera small temporary communities, creating art through a social experiment. He invited passers-by, strangers, to look one another in the eye for one minute, under the embrace of light of the Twice as Twiggy between Soho, Central Park, Coney Island and Chelsea, trying to reveal the thin thread that joins two people, albeit strangers to one another until that moment and therefore, metaphorically, to highlight the closeness of each one, to all humanity.