Calogero Cascio was an Italian photojournalist among the most important between the 1950s and the 1970s thanks to his sensitivity in capturing significant moments in the history and society of the time through his iconic images. His work has left a lasting imprint on the landscape of humanistic and documentary photography.
Calogero Cascio was born on October 20, 1927, in Sciacca (Agrigento), Sicily, where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence between his hometown, Castellammare del Golfo, the birthplace of his paternal family, Trapani and Palermo.
Settling in Rome at the age of twenty-two, while pursuing his university studies in medicine, which he started in Palermo, he developed a keen interest in literature and theater.
Immediately after graduating from university with a degree in Medicine and Surgery, he began to practice in some of the poorest suburbs of Rome and to approach photography, making his first images in Sicily, a land with which he would always have a visceral conflicting relationship of love and hate.
«I cannot explain how and why, at exactly 30 years old, I decided to change everything and become a photographer», Cascio says. And indeed he embarked on a career as an independent photojournalist, coming into contact with the world of publishing, which in those years saw the birth in Italy of important illustrated periodicals such as “Il Mondo”, directed by Mario Pannunzio from 1949 to 1966, or “L’Espresso”, founded in 1955 by Arrigo Benedetti and Eugenio Scalfari.
It was precisely with “Il Mondo” that Cascio established a privileged relationship, a continuous and lively exchange of views with its editor who, in his opinion, tended to publish «beautiful, but not very “vigorous” photos», in which the spirit of true photojournalism, the telling of history and its conflicts, the symbol of which was the Vietnam War, was absent. Many are Cascio’s images published in “Il Mondo” between 1957 and 1966, now preserved in the weekly’s photographic fund at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, constituting one of the main photographic “corpus” of the Sicilian author, in addition to the Cascio archive.
In the 1960s he made numerous reportages in Italy, Europe, the Middle and Far East (Egypt, Israel, India, Nepal, South Vietnam, Laos, Thailand) and South America (Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela).
Together with photographers Caio Garrubba and Antonio and Nicola Sansone, with whom he shared the ideal of journalistic reportage as “political” action, Calogero Cascio founded the Realphoto agency in 1963, contributing with Ermanno Rea, Plinio De Martiis and Franco Pinna to the “Roman school” of photojournalism.
His “social” investigation and tension as a witness of events led him to explore and investigate countryside, streets and peripheral areas of cities, bringing back visual narratives – picture stories – of anthropological, sociological and political imprint, characterized, however, by an empathetic gaze, capable of grasping in every context the universal value of man. It is that same gaze that guides him since his first Sicilian photographs, images of great evocative effectiveness in the sign of documentary photography, but also “humanist”, which in the 1950s investigates the Italian South, with a “civil passion” that finds in photography the means to reveal with intellectual lucidity the reality that presents itself to the gaze, making Calogero Cascio one of the most important photojournalists of the time.
His favorite cameras include the Leica M2, with its full range of optics, and the Nikon Flex for the use of the 300 telephoto lens; for black and white film he remains faithful to the Kodak Tri X.
The ideal of «a radical change in the structures of society» nourishes the narrative of his four photobooks – Lazzaro alla tua porta (1967), Quando io grido a te (1973), Quando dico Speranza (1974), Vangelo a caso (1975) -, where photography becomes the tool for a visual narrative that recognizes in the diverse conditions of human life, in social divides and suffering, the unheard cry of Christian teaching.
His photo reports, often accompanied by his texts, were published in the most important American and European newspapers and periodicals of the 1960s and 1970s, such as “New York Times”, “Life”, “Look”, “Stern”, “Paris Match”, “Sunday Times”, “The Observer”, and, in Italy, “Il Mondo”, “L’Espresso”, “L’Europeo”, “La Stampa”, “Paese Sera”, “Vie Nuove”, “Tempo” and “Orizzonti.” His photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York and in various group exhibitions around the world and are part of important public and private collections.
In the early 1970s he combined his work as a photojournalist with that of a communications consultant before choosing, in 1973, the profession of publisher, which would occupy him for the rest of his life.
Always sensitive and attentive to the various forms of art, beauty and harmony, from the early 1980s he embarked on an artistic path related mainly to painting and sculpture, using different techniques. He follows with great interest the work of a number of artists, especially Sicilian, in whose studios he spends much time in a continuous exchange between learning and his suggestions.
His paintings and sculptures are now held in private collections.
He died in Rome on March 30, 2015.