Italy: PhotoAid, an agency dedicated to development is born

Three professional reporters and a lawyer at the service, photographic, of NGOs. Its name is PhotoAid: it?s the first Ialian photographer agency, that is also a not for profit association, focusing on the projects of the more than 300 Italian non governmental organisations working across the world.

The idea is of Michele Cazzani, Andrea Micheli and Nicola Demolli Crivelli, professional photographers who have worked several years as social reporters in cooperation with Ngos and charities. The fourth partner, Fabrizio Florio, is instead a lawyer and deals with the administration and the communication of the new-born association.

?Our mission is double? explains Michele Cazzani, who has worked several years with the Grazia Neri agency and now is an indipendent photo reporter: ?First of all to offer a professional photographic documentation to associations and Ngos against too many amateur images that we still see circulate, that are realised with the best intentions but that don?t do justice to the work of volunteers and humanitaria workers and to the realities in which they operate”. Though this is just the first step of a more structured communication project. ?The objective is not only to take good pictures, but to make them circulate on the press, through agreements with newspapers and publishing houses. To make it short, we put at disposal our contacts to make images, and consequently ngo?s projects circulate in the information circuit? he says.

Photo Aid has already in its portfolio agreements with some newspapers and is negotiating with Canon, that besides sponsoring the association has offered for free exhibition spaces, as the Spazio Forma (Form Space) of Milan, for the organization of photographic exhibitions. The bookshops Feltrinelli have done the same: a relation of cooperation for cultural initiatives and photographic exhibitions is born with them.

What does it mean being not for profit for a photographer agency? ?We are born with the idea of giving a service to associations, even to the middle-sized and the little ones that don?t have big economic availability?, explains the photographer. Cazzani and partners have made choices even in the photographic language: ?We want to drift apart a pietistic approach, that lingers on suffering and tends to underline in an exasperated and interfering way the drama of some situations? Cazzani says. ?We prefer an approach that recounts reality showing even what is positive in it. Dealing with development projects we believe that is more useful to show what has been done, what works and gives hope instead of provoking compassion showing desperate situations?.

?The experience in Kosovo during the war made me meditate? says Cazzani. ?There were many things to tell, and yet the images on newspapers showed just mass graves. Even the images taken in Africa have often this approach: if you travel in this continent you see a reality with many aspects, and yet on the press the negative point of view especially emerges?.

www.photoaid.eu