Menu
Valerio Spada
Valerio Spada
Fellow: Awarded 2013
Field of Study: Photography
Competition: US & Canada
Valerio Spada lives between New York and Milan. His work is exhibited, collected, and published internationally. On September 2011, Time magazine announced his first self-published book Gomorrah Girl to win the Grand Prize PBN Photography Book Now 2011 as Best Book of the Year, nominated by a panel of eleven international judges, among them Darius Himes, Steve McCurry, and Gerry Badger. Gomorrah Girl was nominated in various Best Book of the Year 2011 Lists, Joerg Colberg (USA), Rob Honstra (Holland), Marc Feustel (Eyecurious, France), Photo Eye with four nominations by John Gossage, Horacio Fernandez, Darius Himes, and Gerry Badger.
He has been nominated as Best Artist of the year 2011 by Mr. Ulrich Pollman, Director of the Münchner StadtMuseum in Munich, Germany, for the Albert Renger-Patzsch Award 2012. In 2012 Jim Goldberg and Kummer & Hermann nominated Gomorrah Girl as Best Book of the Year at Photo Book Award 2012 Kassel at Le Bal, Paris.
His work won the Festival della Fotografia in Rome 2011 as best project and was exhibited at MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy.
Valerio Spada’s work is in various privates and Permanent Collections, George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester (NY), Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland (OH), ICP International Center of Photography, New York (NY), Lightwork, Syracuse (NY), among others.
Excerpt from Mrs. E. Newhall review on first USA solo exhibition at the PPAC Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, September 2012: “Despite Spada’s use of color and his clearly contemporary subjects, his pictures quickly recall the harsh poverty of post-World War II Italian life as portrayed in Italian neorealist films of the 1940s and 1950s, by Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and others. Sadly, this cast of characters is all too real.”