Biography
Armando Casalino, was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1963, photographer and artist, he was first in charge of security services and later employed as a computer technician both in public and private structures.
He started photographing when he was just 10 years old and in the 70’s he experienced the development and printing in B/W and also the passage to SLR cameras. He followed the great masters of photography, such as Newton, Hamilton, Lewis Hine, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Man Ray, Joan Colom, Mario Giacomelli etc., which determined an important guideline in his photographic style.
For a long time Casalino continued photographing as an hobby and only in 2010 he began to deepen his own photographic technique and experience several styles, till he decided to get in the game with an innovative photographic style. In 2012, inspired to an unusual modern dance show, he realized his first solo exhibition, “MitoLogicalMente”, where ancient myths embodied some of the strongest human emotions like: envy, deception, hate, rancor, desire for revenge etc…
In 2013 he realized his second solo exhibition, “progetto Donna” (“project Woman”), through which Casalino wanted to deal with some of the most touchy social subjects such as: genital mutilation, violence, rape, but also the female protest which he represented by portraying from real some of the main representatives of “Femen” Italian section. Such issues immediately caught the attention of media thanks to which many of the best photographs were published in many Italian and foreign magazines and depopulated for months on the web, too.
Later Casalino had several exhibitions in Turin, Genoa, Pordenone, Lodi and Milan. He won the first prize for the best project in the national competition “Chiamala violenza non amore” (“Call it violence not love”), where “Burqa”, “ Infibulazione” (“Female circumcision”) and “Breast ironing” were rewarded and subsequently exhibited in Milan and Turin.
Casalino is an artist constantly evolving and from the social condemnation of violence against women, he moved to some of the most controversial subjects, such as: homosexuality, civil unions and rights of transsexuals, which he managed to represent flawlessly thanks to his own innate elegance and awareness he was walking on land still very farraginous, although highly topical. That is from this assumption that at the beginning of 2016 the first Italian Lgbt calendar, portraying the drag-queens of the Trieste Group Jotassassina, was born. Through his shots, the artist managed to catch the gender duality characterizing his own ambiguous protagonists personality, where the two aspects “man-woman” are perfectly blended.
