Mario Finotti

Mario Finotti (born March 19, 1950) is an Italian photographer and journalist.

Biography

He was born in Novara in 1950, At the age of ten, on hot summer afternoons, he often sneaked into the nearby Faraggiana-Ferrandi natural history museum, where he observed with fascination the stuffed animals and artifacts from Africa and South America, brought back by explorers Ugo Ferrandi, Guido Boggiani, and Alessandro Faraggiana. This early exposure to an exotic world sparked the curiosity that would later characterise his professional career.

1970s Thanks to the fact that the area where he lived was, at the time, a true "photography district" — home to two historic studios, the laboratories of Carlo Anadone and the Lavatelli brothers – he began to take an interest in photography in the early 1970s, choosing it as his preferred medium of expression and identifying Anadone himself as one of his key influences.

He considered political involvement on several occasions, running for municipal elections as a candidate for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in Novara in 1983 and in Garbagna Novarese in 1990.

Alongside his work as a photojournalist, he developed a passion for photography in the advertising sector and in literary production – primarily photographic books – which over time led him to prioritize these pursuits over journalism. The first volume mentioned in official biographies dates back to 1980, concerning the De Pagave retirement home in Novara and produced with the journalist Mario Giarda. Between the 1990s and 2000s, he received numerous commissions from public institutions, including the municipality of Gattico, the National Confederation of Crafts (Confederazione Nazionale dell'Artigianato), Emergency and the Camera di Commercio of Novara.

Since 2010, he has served as the stage photographer for the Teatro Coccia, documenting its productions. This professional experience is also a source of strong emotional involvement for him, due to the evocative power of working in a place so rich in history and art.

In 2023 he donated his rich archive to the Historical Institute of the Resistance of Novara: five boxes of photographs on Novara city life between the 80s and 90s. For the occasion, an exhibition was organized at the Broletto.

The photographer In the 2021 interview he talks about himself by not defining himself as a paparazzo at all, but on the contrary having always cultivated and preferred advertising, landscape and industrial archaeology photography. The interest in the landscape of the southern part of the Province of Novara (Bassa Novarese), in particular, has been at the origin of several works and exhibitions.

Regarding the transition to digital photography, he admits that it affected him and that it took him a few months to master the new equipment and the post-production technique of the images. However, he considers himself satisfied with the transition, since the work is less demanding, with few contraindications, with full control of each single step of the image management[. However, he warns about the disadvantages of digital, mainly related to the contradictions that it introduces into the language of photography itself, given that total control easily allows one to distance oneself from reality.

He considers several photographers as models for his work, of whom he has great respect, including Gianni Berengo Gardin e Francesco Radino.

His opinion on portrait is very clear: to portray a person it is necessary to know and understand them, therefore to be involved in their experience, without prejudice, in order to make choices that lead to the most faithful representation.

Finotti and industrial archaeology

In 1997, the historian and art critic Marco Rosci from Novara described the distinctive features of Finotti's investigation into local industrial archaeology, emphasizing that his work goes beyond simple documentation or reportage of the state of things, taking the form of research, analysis, understanding, and interpretation. In this way, it bears witness to the transformation of Novara's productive landscape, reflecting its complex cultural identity in a territory where traces of industrialization are intertwined with rural and agricultural memory.

In Finotti's work, Rosci observes that, on the one hand, many images highlight the formal essentiality of industrial structures, underlining their functionality and geometry; on the other, the research shifts toward a more nuanced reading of the environmental context, where human artifacts coexist with the persistence (or resistance) of natural elements. Among the latter, water stands out – channeled, regulated, and mechanized through locks and barriers – as does the vegetation along its banks: recurring elements that bear witness to the coexistence of human intervention and nature. This approach creates a visual and conceptual dialectic between artifact and environment, elevating the photographic investigation from simple industrial documentation to a deeper analysis of the landscape and its history. The deliberate avoidance of any "picturesque" or aestheticizing effect reinforces this approach, favoring an essential, sober, and analytical photographic language.

For the Department of Culture

For Consorzio Mutue (with a text by Sebastiano Vassalli).

Image gallery

Portraits

Industrial archaeology