Mimmo Cattarinich
& Pasolini ‘100 for
Istituto Italiano
di Cultura

In 2020 the Italian Cultural Institute in Cairo was putting together an exhibition celebrating the career of Mimmo Cattarinich, a set photographer who worked on some of Italy’s most renowned films. The exhibition - curated by Dominique Lora and held at the IIC in Cairo - was planned in commemoration of what would have been Federico Fellini’s 100th birthday. Cattarinich worked closely with Fellini, as well as with Pier Paolo Pasolini and other acclaimed directors, during the golden era of Italian film. He was a celebrated photographer, capturing candid portraits and evocative images that span from the 1950s all the way to the 1990s, and provide an intimate glimpse behind the scenes of some of Italy’s biggest films.

Together with the director of the IIC in Cairo, Davide Scalmani, and the IIC team, Paolo Vanino and Isabella Bommarito, we discussed creating a publication that very much puts the image first. With such powerful photographs it made sense to allow them to be as prominent as possible on the page and to let them take the forefront, while the typography takes on a secondary role.

The publication is bilingual, in Italian and English, and I chose to place the two languages side by side in equal-width columns, while using different typefaces: a regular-weight slab serif for the Italian and a light sans serif for the English. It felt like a compelling way to guide the Italian-reading vs. English-reading eye through the reading experience, without the use of color or any added visual elements. With the images the idea was to have several grid options that make for a playful and engaging experience, and to be a bit humourous and light-hearted (as some of the photographs are) with how certain images are juxtaposed within a spread or from one spread to the next.

In 2022 the IIC in Cairo was invited to curate a photography exhibition - as part of the 44th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival - to mark what would have been Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 100th birthday. As part of that, they commissioned a second publication - this time focusing on the life and work of Pasolini (which intersects quite a bit with Cattarinich’s) titled ‘Pasolini ‘100’. Together we decided to keep with the design of the first publication, so that the two volumes could act as a series on the golden age of Italian cinema. The book features photos of Pasolini and his film sets from the 1960s and 1970s, including the behind the scenes of notable films such as ‘Medea’ and ‘Canterbury Tales’.