Bio
Vivo e lavoro ad Oristano, Sardegna.
A 8 anni ho avuto la mia prima fotocamera
Non sapevo cosa farmene, pochi giorni dopo l'ho dimenticata.
Venti anni dopo l'ho ritrovata.
Adesso la fotocamera mi porta dentro e fuori da questo mondo delle meraviglie...
ed io sto cercando di rimanere a fuoco.
Vincenzo Caniparoli was born in Pietrasanta, Tuscany, in 1971. He currently lives and works in Sardinia.
After earning a diploma as a surveyor, he worked for 20 years in the marble sculpture and architecture industry in the Carrara area.
He began photographing in 1997, initially focusing on astrophotography before turning his attention to human-altered landscapes. An enthusiast of photographic chemistry, since 2011 he has dedicated himself to historical techniques and alternative photographic printing processes.
His photographs have been exhibited in numerous shows in Italy and abroad, and his work has been featured on online platforms and international magazines such as Lenscratch and Whitefish Review.
In April 2025, he published La via del rame (“The Copper Way”), a historical, scientific, and experimental study on cuprotype — currently the only book entirely dedicated to this technique, to whose development and dissemination he has made a significant contribution.
He is a well-known and respected figure in the international field of experimental photography, with particular attention to siderotype (iron-based photographic printing processes) and mordançage techniques. Several of his photographic projects are part of the archive of the Osservatorio italiano per la fotografia stenopeica (Italian Observatory for Pinhole Photography), housed at MUSINF — the Museum of Modern Art and Information in Senigallia (AN).
He has collaborated with the Engraving and Printmaking Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari and other educational institutions, he's an active promoter of the development and dissemination of knowledge about historical and alternative photographic printing techniques.
Statement
I have been working with alternative photographic printing processes since 2011, with an interest that has grown over time and has become, over the past nine years, my almost exclusive field of activity.
What started as a purely technical interest has evolved into a true field of historical-scientific and artistic-expressive research. This now distinctly characterizes my artistic and research output, both as a photographer and as an author.
**Statement** For the past 10 years, my work has been primarily based on alternative photographic processess. Thanks to these techniques, I have discovered ways to create nonexistent or "impossible to capture in real life" photographic situations. Traditional darkroom techniques, chemical printing in general, and alternative processess like the mordançage technique in particular, lend themselves perfectly for this kind of representations. Understanding the expressive potential of each alternative printing process is crucial. My approach is to get my hands dirty - physically work to learn the technique well in order to satisfy its peculiarities. I don’t like to live a constant battle against technique, forcing it to bend to my needs. Instead, I like to see step-by-step the increasing tuning between it, the medium, and the photographic message. While I love to work with alternative photographic processes, what really interests me are not the techniques as an end in themselves, but what they allow me to do.