"The glance, the cut, the choice of the shot has always been a moment of cinema, never a single crucial moment, rather a taken time, a musical pause…" Filippo studied with several photographers and well-known directors, including also Arno Minkkinenn, De Oliveria, and Mario Bellocchio. In 2003 he met the distinguished Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, and made with him the short film entitled "Out of competition" and the installation called "Lines like wind." Since then, they have worked together in the movie "Tickets," also directed by E. Olmi and K. Loach, and presented it at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Filippo worked as the leading actor, and in "Certified Copy," presented at the Cannes Film Festival. From this experience, his first book - "Viaggio" (Journey) - was born in its French version "Tickets, carnet de tourage."

Filippo Trojano

Filippo Trojano lives in Rome, where he works as a photographer, teacher of photography, actor, and author. He started practicing photography when he was only 11 and, in the same period, he developed his curiosity towards the "seventh art" which, over the years, has turned in a depth research on all-round auteur cinema that has driven him to work also as an actor and author in a lot of film projects. Thereby his photographic vision is always connected to the cinematographic one.

In 2009 he started his long-term photographic project "Ritratti di Mari" (Portraits of Seas), and the following year he became assistant to the photographer Abelardo Morelli in Rome. For three years, he has been a photographer and teacher for the Palaexpo Art laboratory in Rome. Since 1996 he has been attending several international photo festivals, including the Mois de la Photo in Paris. In 2012, his project - "Parallel roads" - on two migrations by using the bicycle in the Pontine plain (Italy), was selected by Photography Rome Festival. Over the years, he has been a member of the jury in several film festivals, including Rencontres Cinématographiques in Cannes and the Cinerail in Paris. Besides being a teacher in many public and private institutions, for four years, Filippo has also been taking a photography workshop within a psychiatric community in Rome.

His photographic and video works have been published in many Italian magazines such as Internazionale, Left, La Repubblica, Nat Geo Italy. In 2018 he made as director the short film "Their eyes." In 2019 he was invited twice at the Macro Asilo Museum in Rome to elaborate on some photographic projects, and one of these was the work "I'm looking for the face I had before the work was done".

Portraits of Seas is a long-term project made in medium format film (a Pentax 67 and a Holga), with the aim of telling Europe through its seas. From Italy to Germany, from France to Spain, from Turkey to Portugal, it's a visual story of 13 chapters performed by the observation of the link between water and land, natural and urban environment, the human presence, and nature's one.

At the moment he's working on three new long-term projects: "Chinartfashion" on Chinese students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Europe; "Cosplay" on the use of the mask in contemporary society and particularly on young people who dress up in comics character masks and "The Sail" on the unfinished pool stadium of the architect Santiago Calatrava, an experimental project which combines photography and illustration by a network of many international artists from all around the world.

Each chapter was born after taking the previous one without a preconceived leading idea except that of looking for the common universal root existing in the relationship that all of us have - since childhood and regardless of culture and birthplaces - with the sea.

The main idea was to form an emotional map without any detailed reference to places in order to push the observer towards a poetic and non-logical connection. During this journey, Erri De Luca's writings, Gianmaria Testa's songs, and Suzy Lee's silent books have all been significant sources of inspiration.