Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1935 Pietrasanta, Italy

Died: 2018 Pietrasanta, Italy

Year of Migration to the UK: 1958

Biography

Photojournalist Romano Cagnoni was born on 9 November 1935 in the small, coastal Tuscan town of Pietrasanta, Italy. Against his father’s will (he wanted his son to become a bookkeeper), after finishing secondary school Cagnoni found work in a local photographic studio, where he learned the basic skills of his trade. In order to make ends meet, he began to sell portraits of beach-goers in the Versilia region in Tuscany, where he met an Englishwoman, Helen Warby.

In 1958 he joined her in London where they married. In the capital, Cagnoni embarked upon a prolific freelance career photographing many weddings of the newly-immigrant black communities of Dalston and Hackney, where local photographic studios often refused commissions from black families due to racial prejudice. In 1965 he produced a powerful image of Winston Churchill’s funeral procession. In same year, he managed to photograph the actress Elizabeth Taylor on the balcony of her hotel room by climbing down from the rooftop of the Dorchester Hotel. Thanks to the success of these images, Cagnoni was able to buy professional photographic equipment. A fellow photographer, Alan Vines, introduced him to Simon Guttmann, a pioneer of modern photojournalism who had initiated Robert Capa into photography. Guttmann invited Cagnoni to join him in Report, his photo agency in London. Thanks to Guttmann’s contacts in the progressive movement, Cagnoni was employed as the official Labour Party photographer in 1964, and was responsible for photographing Harold Wilson as he travelled across Britain on his election tour.

In November 1965 Cagnoni became the first independent, western reporter to enter North Vietnam, at the peak of the war against the USA, visiting the country with the journalist James Cameron and the news cameraman Malcolm Aird. Cagnoni produced a number of poignant photos of the ordinary Vietnamese people, reflecting their daily lives as they struggled to work the land and endured the bombing of their homes. His photos of President Ho Chi Minh and Prime Minister Pham Van Dong were featured on the front covers of many major magazines, including Life, Espresso, The Observer and The Economist. In 1967 Cagnoni was in Biafra in West Africa to cover the three-year Nigerian Civil War for Report. Here he produced one of his most powerful images, a group of 150 young, bare-chested, shaven-headed Biafran recruits gathered in the harsh sunlight. Cagnoni’s dramatic photos, reflecting his commitment to the Biafran people's cause, earned him the USA’s prestigious Press Award for his coverage of the war in Life magazine. In 1969 an exhibition of his Biafra images, sponsored by the Spectator, was staged in a tent in Trafalgar Square. By the early 1970s, his collaboration with Simon Guttmann and Report came to an end and Cagnoni continued to work as a freelancer covering stories for many publications including the Observer and Sunday Times. During the next decade, he produced two widely-published photo essays on the Russian army’s presence in Afghanistan and, later, its military presence in Poland. Although Cagnoni was associated with war and covered many conflicts, he once said of himself: 'I would like to make it clear that I do not consider myself a war photographer, rather a photographer [who] knows what war means and how to document it' (The Guardian Obituary).

After he divorced his second wife, Cagnoni left London and returned to his hometown of Pietrasanta in Italy. In 1991, he photographed the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, images which were published widely across the world’s press. His clean, rigorous photos of shelled and bullet-ridden buildings in the conflict zone, characterised by sharp compositions, produced (in Cagnoni’s own words) ‘a disturbing effect based on the perfection of the image in contrast with the imperfection of war'. In 1995 he set up a photographic studio in in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in the middle of a war zone during the conflict between the Russians and Chechen people and produced solemn portraits of local fighters for a series entitled Warriors. Even into his seventies, Cagnoni worked in Turkey, Syria (Kobane) and Jordan, with his third wife, the photographer Patricia Franceschetti. Romano Cagnoni died in Pietrasanta, Italy on 30 January 2018. According to Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times in 1967–81, Cagnoni was 'one of the five most important photographers of the 20th century', alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bill Brandt, Don McCullin and W Eugene Smith (Fondazione Romano Cagnoni). Cagnoni participated in more than 40 exhibitions and retrospectives worldwide, including at the Royal Photographic Society (1971), Hamiltons Gallery (1983), Photographer’s Gallery, London (1984), and Proud Gallery (2011), all in London. Cagnoni's work is held in Italian collections but is currently not represented in any UK public collections. In 2020 Travel Media House released the documentary Romano Cagnoni – War Photographer.

Related books

'Romano Cagnoni, Photojournalist', The Telegraph, 18 April 2018, p. 6
Stefano Cagnoni, 'Romano Cagnoni', National Union of Journalists magazine, March-April 2018, p. 25
Romano Cagnoni, La Guerra negli Occhi (Firenze: Giunti, 2011)
Enrica Viganò, Romano Cagnoni: Scurochiaro (Milano: Electa, 2003)
Renzo Zorzi, Romano Cagnoni: il Mondo a Fuoco (Milano: Electa, 2000)
Romano Cagnoni, Italy (Amsterdam: Time-Life Books, 1988)

Public collections

Related organisations

Report (photographer)

Selected exhibitions

Auction of Exceptional Photographs, PhotoVoice, London (2011)
Sex Drugstores and Rock & Roll: A History of The Kings Road, Proud Gallery London (2011)
ChiaroScuro, solo exhibition, Chelsea Arts Club, London (2010)
Brief Encounter, solo exhibition, Blacks Club, London (2010)
The Coca-Cola Bottle, Design Museum, London (2007)
Trees, group exhibition, Photographer’s Gallery, London (1984)
Kindness, group exhibition, the Keflex Collection, The Hamiltons Gallery, London (1983)
Florence Floods, solo exhibition, Swiss Cottage Library, London (1966)
Biafra, solo exhibition, Spectator magazine Trafalgar Square tent, London (1969)
Fotografie di Romano Cagnoni, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, London (1972)
Color Supplement Photo-journalists, group exhibition, The Royal Photographic Society, London (1971)
Witness, 4 Photographers, group exhibition, Photographer’s Gallery London (1971)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Romano Cagnoni]