Elio Ciol is an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 photographer

Photography

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 and publisher who was born in Casarsa della Delizia

Casarsa della Delizia

Casarsa della Delizia, simply known as Casarsa, is a comune in the Province of Pordenone in the Italian region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, located about 80 km northwest of Trieste and about 15 km east of Pordenone....

 in Friuli-Venezia Giulia

Friuli-Venezia Giulia

Friuli–Venezia Giulia is one of the twenty regions of Italy, and one of five autonomous regions with special statute. The capital is Trieste. It has an area of 7,858 km² and about 1.2 million inhabitants. A natural opening to the sea for many Central European countries, the region is...

, the region where he has principally lived and worked. His father was a photographer who kept a studio in their hometown and Elio was fascinated by the technical aspects and worked in the darkroom as a boy. A formative experience was when, during the Nazi occupation, a German doctor brought in films with photographs of the countryside rather than of people, "photographs that I myself should have been able to do and which I had not done or even imagined." He began practising photography at fifteen, worked full time in the studio from nineteen, and spent an increasing amount of his free time taking photographs for his own interests. A trip to Assisi

Assisi

- Churches :* The Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi is a World Heritage Site. The Franciscan monastery, il Sacro Convento, and the lower and upper church of St Francis were begun immediately after his canonization in 1228, and completed in 1253...

 in 1951 made a great impression; Ciol subsequently spent much time there, taking many photographs.

Dissatisfied with the conventions demanded in Italian photographic contests, Ciol ambitiously entered contests abroad; in 1955 and 1956 he was encouraged by favorable mentions in the American magazine Popular Photography.

Ciol was greatly influenced by the ideas of Luigi Crocenzi, emphasizing sequence rather than single images when illustrating a book or other story (an example had been Crocenzi's Conversazione in Sicilia, with text by Elio Vittorini

Elio Vittorini

Elio Vittorini was an Italian writer and novelist. He was a contemporary of Cesare Pavese and an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing. His best-known work is the anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941. The first U.S...

). Ciol moved to Milan in 1963 to work on projects for the firm of Altimani; this soon ran into financial difficulties and Ciol returned to Casarsa, but invigorated with new ideas for the illustration and layout of books. He has illustrated dozens of books since that time.

Ciol has concentrated on creating a photographic record and archive of Italian works of art, architecture, landscapes, and archaeological sites and artefacts, particularly in Friuli

Friuli

Friuli is an area of northeastern Italy with its own particular cultural and historical identity. It comprises the major part of the autonomous region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, i.e. the province of Udine, Pordenone, Gorizia, excluding Trieste...

. His works are black and white, sometimes employing infrared-sensitive

Infrared photography

In infrared photography, the film or image sensor used is sensitive to infrared light. The part of the spectrum used is referred to as near-infrared to distinguish it from far-infrared, which is the domain of thermal imaging. Wavelengths used for photography range from about 700 nm to about...

film. Some of his photographs show people so close as to be recognizable, but more often people appear as small figures within landscapes. More often still the landscapes are devoid of people.