Francesco Cito - PORTFOLIO

According to Ferdinando Scianna, Francesco Cito “is perhaps one of the best photojournalists in Italy: he has an instinct for capturing the event, a passionate drive to tell a story, and the ability to produce images, powerfully synthetic and rigorously simple, that catch the very essence of the moment.”
Since leaving his hometown of Naples at 23, he has travelled continuously as a freelance photojournalist, taking memorable photos: in Afghanistan in 1980 he followed groups of guerrillas fighting against invading Soviet forces; in Naples in late 1982 and early 1983 he reported on the activities of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia; on the war front in Lebanon in 1983 as a correspondent for “Epoca” magazine, he recorded the internal split in the PLO between the supporters of Arafat and the pro Syrian followers of Abu Mussa as it happened. He was the only photojournalist to document the PLO’s surrender of their stronghold, the Beddawi refugee camp. Since 1985 he has been following the situation in Palestine, exposing the terrible living conditions in the occupied territories with a series of photographs that won him the 1997 City of Atri Prize for Peace and Freedom, awarded by the Abruzzese Institute for the History of the Resistance Movement. As well as photo-reporting from many areas of the globe as foreign correspondent for “Venerdì di Repubblica” magazine (again in Afghanistan in 1989, in Saudi Arabia in 1990 to report on the landing of American troops following the invasion of Kuwait), he has explored many aspects of Italian life with his superb photographic series: weddings in Naples, the Palio di Siena horse race (first prize in the World Press Photo Contest 1996) and, most recently, life in Sardinia.