Mauro Pozzer bought his first camera, a small Cosina, with money from odd jobs in the early 1980s, and in 1996 took out a loan to buy a wedding studio in Vicenza, Magic Foto Studio. He has photographed weddings professionally ever since, and was co-founder and president of ANFM, the Italian wedding photographers' association, from 2008 to 2010. He was born a few miles from Venice and still works from Corso Padova in Vicenza.
He describes his way of working as poetic realism, a name borrowed from French photography of the 1930s and 1940s. In practice that means documentary coverage: he does not stage moments or direct poses, he waits and follows the day, and he works with natural light wherever he can. He has summed his style up as reportage plus fashion, and the fashion eye still shows in his portraits, but the emphasis on his current site is on stillness and truth rather than spectacle.
“Poetic realism is not a technique. It is the way I see the world.”
Mauro Pozzer
After years shooting only digital he returned to film, and a long photography project inside the hospital of Vicenza, begun in 2018, became the book City of Angels in 2020, followed by a second book, Nessuno si salva da solo. Couples can now choose film only, digital only, or both, with Mauro on 35mm or medium format film and a second photographer on digital. He keeps a separate site, Analog Film Wedding, for his film work, and runs analogue photography and darkroom courses.
Venice is home ground: his published weddings include the Hotel Cipriani, the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and the Spanish Synagogue, as well as Villa Valmarana ai Nani in Vicenza and the Gipsoteca Canova. Elsewhere in Italy he has photographed at Villa del Balbianello and Villa Cipressi on Lake Como, Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, Capri, Castello Ristonchi near Florence and Rome. Abroad, his blog shows weddings in Paris, Marbella, Belgium, the Brissago Islands, the island of Rab in Croatia, Seattle, San Francisco and Hong Kong, and he says he has also worked in Australia and Africa. Ceremonies range from Catholic and civil to Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Assyrian.
He takes no more than 20 weddings a year. Within a few weeks of the wedding a first selection goes into a private online gallery for the couple and their guests; the full set, normally at least 700 edited photographs, follows in four to eight weeks, longer for film-only weddings. Couples who choose digital receive everything in colour plus a selection in black and white.
