THERE IS a certain sun-bleached intensity to Italian photographer Massimo Gurciullo’s images — a raw, instinctive way of seeing that sits somewhere between documentary and dream. It’s the kind of vision that couldn’t have emerged fully formed; it took decades, darkrooms, detours through Paris and ultimately a return to Sicily for it to take shape.
Yet it all began modestly. “I started photography very young,” Gurciullo recalls. “I bought, with my small savings, my first camera at the age of eleven. It was an Agfa Instamatic. It was 1972.” That humble camera was the start of a journey that would carry him far beyond the boundaries of his native island.
At twenty, Gurciullo left Sicily for Paris, determined to become a photographer. He was fortunate — the Paris of the 1980s was alive with possibility, especially for creative souls. “Things were different back then – there was work. And then, the ’80s in Paris were memorable for all creatives,” he says.
His years in Paris laid the foundations for a career steeped in the tactile craft of photography. Working in the studio, shooting on film and spending long hours in the darkroom became his world. Over more than three decades, nudes and portraits dominated his practice, shaping a body of work that was both disciplined and deeply personal.
Even while taking on commercial commissions, Gurciullo always pursued his own artistic explorations. These surfaced in books like Nudi, which captured the raw energy of nudes shot in Paris during 1982 and 1983, and Portraits Cycle N°3, a hand-crafted artist’s book produced in just 100 signed and numbered copies, with prints he made himself in the darkroom. In 2012, he gathered three decades of this work into Portraits…30 ans, a quiet testament to his long commitment to observing the human figure.
Eventually, though, he reached a turning point. “All this lasted more than thirty years,” Gurciullo reflects. “At a certain point I felt the need for a change, to regenerate myself. I took a small compact and hit the road.”
Paris, too, had changed. It no longer pulsed with the same creative spark that had first drawn him in. So he returned home to Sicily — this time with a fresh perspective and without the weight of the studio.
It was there that his most defining project took shape. Sicily began as a personal exploration, far removed from tourist clichés and tired mafia tropes. “It’s a collection of images of the most unusual Sicily,” he explains. “A Sicily that beats, that vibrates with life. A surprising living theatre.”
Gurciullo’s approach is refreshingly direct. “I find pictures. I don’t write with light, I don’t tell stories, I don’t investigate. I look at the world and encounter pictures. I document nothing except the flow of life.”
He acknowledges how all his earlier work fed into this. Even pieces he once questioned have taken on new meaning over time. “Everything we’ve done before has helped shape who we are today. Sometimes we do work we’re not entirely satisfied with, but then, when we look back on it many years later, we can appreciate something in it.”
After four years roaming Sicily’s streets and processions with a digital camera, he published Sicily in 2017 through a Portuguese publisher. Its unexpected success transformed the project into something larger: a large-format annual magazine that Gurciullo considers part diary, part travelling exhibition. By 2025, Sicily #6 had just been released and the next issue was already planned for March 2026.
For Gurciullo, print remains essential, especially in a digitally saturated world. “Today, there are countless online magazines, but very few of them are truly successful,” he says. “After an overload of digital content, people have started to rediscover the pleasure of touching paper. A high-quality printed magazine, especially in the field of photography, has a much greater chance of achieving genuine success.”
He sees these books as his way of sharing Sicily with the world — a chance for many more people to engage with his images than would ever see an original print on a gallery wall. “It’s a sort of travelling expo. A photography book or magazine is accessible to everyone, so many more people can see your work. The market for printed photographs is a bit limited today, but a good publication helps them sell better.”
Throughout his life, Gurciullo has drawn inspiration from some of the 20th century’s most incisive artists. As a photographer, he has always admired Klein, Moriyama, Avedon, Mapplethorpe and Petersen; among painters, it’s Bacon, Hopper and Freud who resonate most deeply. And when he considers what makes a photograph truly work, he’s quick to warn against empty spectacle. “Effective photographs are those that engage the public. But this is always a risk because the general public tends to be captivated by a forced aestheticisation of images. Salgado’s most recent work has fallen into this trap. Images as a spectacle in themselves ultimately lead to nothing.”
Now, with his collaborators, Gurciullo is already deep into Sicily #7. The project continues to grow quietly — the first editions ran to just 100 copies, but they’ve now climbed to 300, evidence of steady momentum built through word of mouth and the enduring pull of physical print.
What emerges from Gurciullo’s story — and is vividly clear in the images that fill his books — is a visceral, instinctive way of seeing that dances between documentary and poetry. His photographs crackle with grain and heavy contrast, as if time itself were etched into their surfaces. Blurred figures and tilted frames destabilise any sense of comfortable observation, drawing us closer to the nervous pulse of life.
There’s an intimacy here, but also a certain estrangement: faces half-lit, gestures caught in awkward half-beats, moments that resist narrative closure. Like the work of Moriyama or Petersen he admires, Gurciullo’s images compel not by spectacle, but by their haunted, searching quality. In his Sicily, we don’t find neat stories or postcard vistas; we encounter instead something far more honest — a living, breathing theatre, as restless and fragile as the human heart itself.
- All images courtesy of Massimo Gurciullo
