Chiara Samugheo, great photographer of divas in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, from Liz Taylor to Monica Vitti, from Shirley MacLane to Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Gina Lollobrigida died on January 13 in Bari.
Sources close to the family confirm this to ANSA.
Born in Bari on 25 March 1935 (but many claim that it was in '25: her date of birth was one of the best kept secrets of her life), real name Chiara Paparella, she had returned to the Apulian capital at the end of a very intense professional life spent in Milan, Rome and Nice, friend of journalists and intellectuals, from Enzo Biagi to Pierpaolo Pasolini, from Alberto Moravia to Giorgio Strehler. It was the journalist Pasquale Prunas, her life partner for a long time, who advised her to take a stage name by choosing for her that of a Sardinian village.
The arrival to photography for the cinema after an initial period dedicated to news and social reportage. Then the success that led her to sign the covers of major international magazines and to establish herself as the first Italian professional photographer. What differentiates her from her colleagues is the ability to create a dialogue and a profound intimacy with her subject, making them leak out of her photographs. Playing on the essentiality of the lines, on the strong color contrasts, on sumptuous hairstyles, he has dramatically renewed the studio portrait, which will become a model for the subsequent fashion and cinema photography of the 80s. Much of his immense photographic archive, which has more than 165,000 shots, is kept at the Study Center and communication archive of theUniversity of Parma. The last exhibition, which he wanted to dedicate to Raffaella Carrà, was set up in Avellino last autumn with the curatorship of Gianluca Marziani.
