Antonio Licari

Antonio Licari was born in Catania in 1968. The passion for the aesthetic appeal of metaphysics and for fashion was born first, and for photography he was an unknown emerita until the age of 22, to the point where, when he was at school, loved spending hours admiring the mannequins dressed in the latest in the department stores and shoops.

One day, by mistake, when he still was a student at the ” Faculty of Physics”, he missed the bus stop and droped in front of the Academy of Fine Arts. An electrocution for him that used his hours drawing in the notebook right under the book of Physics I.

So, a year later, he was a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania.

It was there that the meeting takes place that will mark the whole course of his life.

It was there he realized that photography is the most suitable means of expression for his urgent need to tell his surreal visions.

It was the period of learning of the techniques, still basic, on the scenic composition and management of light, and creativity, posing its first characters: the sister’s Barbie, the human-sized skeleton mannequins borrowed from the classroom of artistic anatomy, the real dummies of the fashion shops of the city.

The materialization, finally happened, of a dreamed world. Professional photographer since 1996 – after his academic studies he moved first to Florence, where he attended one of the most important Italian fashion & beauty schools, the “Click-up” by Leonardo Maniscalchi, and later in Milan, where he has the opportunity to come in close contact with the most creative personalities of the fashion system whose influences will help him above all to develop his personal way of managing the light in the studio and in the location. Here he also had the opportunity to acquire new skills in the graphics industry that will influence forever his aesthetic sense and all his artistic production.

The personal events have brought him back to Catania, a city where today he plays a leading role in the panorama of fashion and advertising photography. His work is “light” but never superficial, in which the planning and the scrupulousness of the execution combined with the compositional rigor are the basis of his artistic production. His subjects, emptied of their essence, are traced back to an appearance reminiscent of the mannequins.

He has been professor of some experimental laboratories of photojournalism at the University of Catania.

He currently collaborates with the “Fondazione Fiumara d’Arte” of Antonio Presti in the realization of a training and social project, directed by Antonio Presti and Pepi Morgia and with the participation of the National Geographic photographer Reza Deghati.

Co-founder of the Sciara Reports Agency, he is now engaged, together with his colleague Luca Garneri, in a a wide-ranging educational project with the cultural association Officina Fotografica, founded by them.