Giovanni Gastel

Giovanni Gastel's (Milan, 1955-2021) career as a photographer began in a basement in Milan in the late 1970s, where very young Gastel spent his long years of apprenticeship taking photos and learning the basic techniques of a profession that it would later lead him to success. Between 1975 and 1976 he worked for the London auction house Christie's, putting into practice what he had learned. The turning point of his career came in 1981 when he met Carla Ghiglieri, who became his agent and brought him closer to the world of fashion: after the publication of his first still life in the Italian magazine "Annabella", in 1982, he began to collaborate with "Vogue Italy ”and, then, thanks to the meeting with Flavio Lucchini, Director of Edimoda, and Gisella Borioli, with“ Mondo Uomo ”and“ Mondo Donna ”. Between the Eighties and Nineties, Gastel's career in the fashion world exploded in parallel with the Made in Italy boom. In those years, Gastel developed advertising campaigns for the most prestigious Italian fashion houses including Versace, Missoni, Tod's, Trussardi, Krizia, Ferragamo and many others. Success in Italy also brought him to Paris - where in the nineties he worked for brands such as Dior, Nina Ricci, Guerlain - as well as to the United Kingdom and Spain. Although his career began in the fashion world, Gastel (photographer and, at the same time, also a poet) quickly understood that his impulse to express himself also requires projects with purely artistic purposes. The artistic consecration was not long in coming and, in 1997, Triennale Milano dedicated a personal exhibition curated by Germano Celant to him. The exhibition launches Gastel at the top of the world photographic elite and his professional success is consolidated so much that his name appears in specialized magazines alongside that of sacred monsters of Italian photography such as Oliviero Toscani, Giampaolo Barbieri, Ferdinando Scianna and legends internationals such as Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino and Jürgen Teller. Professional success opens the door to another side of Gastel's photographic repertoire that had remained unexplored until the end of the 2000s: the portrait. In recent years, Gastel finds himself passionate about this branch of photography and, as he always did in his career, he totally immerses himself in it.