Antonio Lacchini
Founder of Opera Viva and photographer · With Opera Viva since 2024
Antonio Lacchini was born in Soresina in the spring of 1984. He founded Opera Viva in 2024 – even before the project was given that name – and works there as a photographer.
He has been photographing boats and the sea since he was a child. His family has a house on the Island of Elba, where he has been going since he was one year old. In the summer, his father, a keen sailor, would bring a flat-pack dinghy with an inflatable floor to the island, assemble it and use it for three weeks to reach the coves that cannot be reached from land. Then came a small sailing boat.
The first photograph commissioned for the project, Alone, was taken on the Island of Elba in early 2024, during a business trip: a small sailing boat with a cloud behind it.
He works with two techniques, chosen according to the subject and the light. Digital infrared, using a modified camera: the sea and sky do not reflect infrared light and remain dark, so the hull stands out from its surroundings. This technique works only in sunlight and is used for boats at sea, in harbours and at regattas. Large-format analogue photography, using an 8 × 10 view camera, is used for shipyard interiors, boats under cover, portraits and on cloudy days.
Whenever possible, he develops the negative and prints it in the darkroom using silver salts. More often, however, he scans it at high resolution and prints it using carbon pigment ink on cotton paper, as with his infrared images.
On shipyards, his work focuses on how boats are made: the construction processes, the designers and the workers, and the tools worn down by use. Before taking photographs, he spends time with the people at the shipyard, and returns there several times, in different light conditions and seasons. For an event such as the Barcolana, he arrives a few days early to study the light and the best vantage points. For his personal projects, he loads his cameras into his car and drives around the Island of Elba.