Texas Trigger
by Luca Santese, Marco P. Valli
In May 2024, Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli embarked on a journey across Texas at the height of the U.S. presidential election campaign. Over a little more than a month, they drove approximately 5,000 miles—documenting a wide range of environments across the state: cities, suburbs, rural and industrial areas, and the borderlands.
Today, Texas stands as one of the key vantage points from which to observe and understand some crucial dynamics shaping contemporary American society: immigration policy, the proliferation of firearms, political and cultural tensions, and the ongoing clash between conservative ideals and progressive movements.
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(Book Cover)
(Book Spreads)
The book is divided into chapters that follow the chronology of events and encounters from the trip. However, there is no index to separate them schematically—instead, the work unfolds as a continuous photographic sequence, where each part flows into the next through a visual trigger: a threshold that signals the passage from one chapter to another. Besides referring to the mechanism of a firearm or the device that activates the authors’ camera flashes, the trigger is also meant as an activator that disorients and provokes an emotional response.
Translation and copy editing by Matilde Manicardi
Cover illustration by Giovanni Pallotta
Design, text, and captions
by Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli
First edition of 700
ISBN 979-12-81396-01-2
Printed in Italy, May 2025
Hardback, GardaPat 13 Kiara
24×27 cm / 9,4×10,6 in
152 pages, 80 photos
Offset
Malatì
by Luca Santese, Marco P. Valli Published by Cesura Publish
On June 4, 2023, the city of Naples officially celebrated the S.C.C. Naples’ victory in the Italian football championship 2023, an extraordinary event that last occurred with the ‘miracle’ of Diego Armando Maradona 33 years ago. On the very same day, June 4, Luca Santese & Marco P. Valli released Malatì, a photographic newspaper shot in Naples between April 29 and May 4, the week that marked the championship’ certain victory.
Neapolitans’ mad eternal love for their city and football team has not spared the two authors, who, possessed by the same holy Malatì (literal for ‘madness’, and title of a Naples’ TikTok hit song which now became the team’s anthem), try to give it back in this photographic volume rich in icons of the city, its history, and inhabitants. The latter are reinterpreted in a chaotic, extreme, reckless, and fleeing visual play—as a scooter speeding in the night through the neighborhoods’ alleys of Naples
BUY
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Neapolitans’ mad eternal love for their city and football team has not spared the two authors, who, possessed by the same holy Malatì (literal for ‘madness’, and title of a Naples’ TikTok hit song which now became the team’s anthem), try to give it back in this photographic volume rich in icons of the city, its history, and inhabitants. The latter are reinterpreted in a chaotic, extreme, reckless, and fleeing visual play—as a scooter speeding in the night through the neighborhoods’ alleys of Naples
BUY
The cover’s photograph portrays a personalized cake realized for the two authors by a Neapolitan pastry chef; on the back side, the photographic volume ends with the cake’s left-overs surrounding the fragment of a Neapolitan poem.
The fanzine is the first edition of the Dispacci series, created by Cesura Publish with the intention of imprinting Italian news chronicles on the newsprint paper.
Printed in Italy, June 2023
Newsprint paper
40 pages, 50 photos
Rotogravure
All photographs shown in this publication were taken in Naples, Italy.
*the product may vary due to the printing process
The fanzine is the first edition of the Dispacci series, created by Cesura Publish with the intention of imprinting Italian news chronicles on the newsprint paper.
Printed in Italy, June 2023
Newsprint paper
40 pages, 50 photos
Rotogravure
All photographs shown in this publication were taken in Naples, Italy.
*the product may vary due to the printing process
Il Corpo del Capitano
by Luca Santese, Marco P. Valli
Preface by Filippo Ceccarelli
Postface by Nicola Patruno
Published by Cesura Publish
In 2018, photographers Luca Santese and Marco P. Valli documented the birth of the so-called Third Republic in a critical-satirical way. After the end of the First Conte Government, their research focused on Matteo Salvini – the political leader of the Italian Lega – and center-right forces. His voters call him “The Captain”.
Salvini’s propaganda style is highly innovative: he is constantly photographing himself, his daily life and his body, to come across as a ‘man of the people’. “The Captain’s Body” relies on an organic and detailed documentation of Salvini’s activities that openly and radically hinders the way Salvini portrays himself.
BUY
(Book Cover)
(Book Spreads)
His likeable, colourful, “pop” aesthetics is opposed by a rigorous black and white, obscure and dystopic. At the beginning of the book, one might have the feeling that the project is truthfully and ironically documenting different perspectives of Salvini’s propaganda; However, the work transforms into a counter-propaganda, as Santese and Valli put forward their own imaginary storytelling: a definite response to the factious narrative that “the captain” often uses.
Il Corpo del Capitano
by Luca Santese, Marco P. Valli
Preface by Filippo Ceccarelli
Postface by Nicola Patruno
Hardcover printed on Favini Remake Midnight carapace paper
24×34 cm / 9,4×13,3 in
128 pages, 226 photos
Offset print - First edition of 1000
ISBN 978-88-945611-0-4
Printed in Italy, October 2020
Italy&Italy
Photographs by Pasquale Bove
Curated by Luca Santese
Preface by Giancarlo Dotto
From photojournalist Pasquale Bove’s vast archive, comprising more than 250,000 images, Luca Santese identified 306 shot between 1985 and 2000 as the conceptual cornerstones of Italy&Italy. Following precise editing criteria, Santese’s main goal with Bove’s archive was to create and organically articulate the iconography of those years, starting from a fragment: the everyday and social life of the city of Rimini and its surroundings.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Rimini represented what could be defined as “italian-ness”; in Rimini everyone felt at home, from the prominent politicians who had fun in the many dancing clubs, to the thousands of working-class people who reached this holiday destination from every city of the country.
Bove has photographed and catalogued hundreds of situations and environments that radically differ from each other, free from political or social distinctions. The result is a project that conveys different feelings, moods, memories, joys, and sorrows.
Hardcover with screen printed title
6,69 x 9,64 in / 17 x 24,5 cm
632 pages, 306 photos
Color offset
First Edition of 700
ISBN 978-88-906328-4-6
Printed in Italy, September 2016
(Installation shots from Italy&Italy Exhibition, Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia, 2016)
Found Photos
in Detroit
By Arianna Arcara, Luca Santese Cesura publish, 2012
The project Found Photos in Detroit was born from the idea of a reportage concerning the city of Detroit. The project wanted originally to portrait the current abandon and decandence of Detroit, as consequence of the well known socio-economical crisis that hit the city from the middle Seventies. During the first trip, in December 2009, many photos and documents were found close to several decadent public buildings, such as police stations, schools, tribunals and hospitals. This material, even if at that time was just random, revealed immediatly a stunning documentary potential.
LINK TO THE PROJECT
(Book Cover)
(Found Photos in Detroit book)
In 2012 the autors published the Found Photos in Detroit book. The book has collected seven nominations as the best photographic book of the year and was selected by Martin Parr and Garry Badger for the series: Photobook: A History Vol III, which collects the 200 best books after the second world war.
(Photobook: A History Vol III)