Biography
Born in 1923 in Solis, near Belluno, Mario De Biasi lived in Milan since 1938, the city where he dies in 2013. He starts taking photographs in 1945 with a camera found in the debris of Nuremberg were he was deported. Having returned to Italy, he holds his first solo exhibition in 1948 and in 1953 begins his 30 years collaboration with the magazine Epoca working on numerous assignments around the world and many hundreds of front covers. His exhibition career has been very prolific: to be remembered the Gli Universalisti at the Photokina in Colone in 1972, The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943 – 1968 at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum of New York in 1994 (his photo “Gli Italiani si voltano” was chosen as the official image for the exhibition poster) and the wonderful retrospective at the Arengario in Milan in 2000. Winner of the Erich Solomon Preis in Colone in 1964, the Saint Vincent Price for journalism in 1982, the Life Achievement Award at the Arles Festival in 1994 and the Golden Ambrogino in 2006, he is one of the artists in the volume The Faces of Photography: Encounters with 50 Master Photographers of the 20th Century. In 2003 he was awarded the title Mestro of Italian Photography by FIAF (the Italian Federation of Photography Associations) and in that occasion a monograph volume was published in the Book Series “Great Authors”. The list of books he published to this day numbers 91: one of the most recent is Metamorphosis with an introductory essay by Vittorio Sgarbi. In all his Biographies he liked to quote what his great friend Bruno Munari wrote: “He photographed revolutions and famous people, unknown countries. He photographed volcanoes erupting and snow extents at the North Pole at -65° C. The camera has now become part of his anatomy like the nose and the eyes”. When he was not taking photographs he enjoyed drawing and painting.
