Claudio Santambrogio

Claudio Santambrogio is a photographer/artist and flutist. He is active as a flutist in both early music and contemporary music, specializing in period instruments, and he is a member of the Modena Consort.

As a photographer, he is self-taught, working exclusively with analog photographic techniques: film cameras, primarily large-format view cameras, traditional chemicals and processes, and frequently employing historic photographic techniques. He prefers working with historic lenses that lack a shutter, allowing for the flexibility of manually timed long exposures using a lens cap. Developing negatives and prints, often using alternative or historic photographic techniques and layering his photographic works with subsequent interventions, are integral to his artistic approach.

His focus is primarily on historical photographic techniques, reinterpreted in a contemporary way in his projects—including photogenic drawings, calotypes, salted paper prints, albumen prints, daguerreotypes, platinum prints, gum bichromate prints, and lith prints.

He works at the Photography Conservatory near Milan, a center dedicated to analog photography and traditional printing techniques, where he produces direct prints from negatives in color and black and white, or employs various historical techniques. He also promotes knowledge of traditional and historic photographic techniques through workshops.

His works have been exhibited at the Photovisa Festival in Krasnodar (Russia) as well as the Baltic Biennale of Photography Photomania in Kaliningrad (Russia), during the Venice Biennale, and in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Cyprus. His works are in the permanent collection of the Fox Talbot Museum of Photography in Lacock, United Kingdom, and in numerous private collections across Europe and Switzerland.