Luciano Rigolini

• Name — Luciano Rigolini • Born — 2 August 1950 • Birthplace — Tesserete, Ticino, Switzerland • Known for — Documentary production, photography Luciano Rigolini (born 2 August 1950) is a Swiss artist, photographer, bookmaker, producer, and former commissioning editor at Arte in Paris. Swiss Grand Award for Design 2024, the highest honour for Swiss designer and photographers assigned by the Federal Office of Culture (FOC)

He studied cinema but soon turned to photography. In 1995 he joined the documentary unit of the European television channel Arte in Paris, where he was responsible for creative author film development until 2015. He produced films by filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Alexandre Sokourov, Naomi Kawase, Chantal Akerman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, Laurie Anderson. He is the author of Arte of Collection Photo, 12 documentaries on the history of photography from its origins to today with the scientific collaboration of Quentin Bajac. Since 2002 he has been working in photography exclusively through appropriation and rereading of amateur images and industrial documents. His work is also expressed through several author's books. Parr and Badger include Surrogates (2012) in the third volume of their photobook history. They write: "In Surrogates, he has taken as his source imagery spare parts for vintage cars available for sale on eBay. He then retouches and greatly enlarges them, presenting them on plain or colour-field backgrounds so that they become re-contextualized as formal images, stripped from their former function". Private/Used (2013) is a book of photographs of women in lingerie, selling their used underwear on eBay. Mask (2015) is a collection of grilles of cars made in Detroit between 1955 and 1962. He taught cinema and photography in several universities, including the Rice University of Houston, the Sci-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture), the Head (Geneva University of Art and Design) and the Documentary Master of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. In 2024 Luciano Rigolini won the Swiss Grand Award for Design, the highest honour for Swiss designer and photographers assigned by the Federal Office of Culture (FOC)

• Luciano Rigolini: Fotografie ’90–’92, Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, 1992 • Luciano Rigolini, Città aperta-Open City, Photographs 1990-1995, Farish Gallery, Rice University School of Architecture, Houston, 1995 • Luciano RIgolini. Photographs 1990-1995, Foto Forum, St. Gallen, 1996 • Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, 2008 • Luciano Rigolini. Another image, Max Museo-Spazio Officina, Chiasso, 2011. • Surrogates, Centre Culturelle Suisse, Paris, 2012 • Luciano Rigolini, Concept Car, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, 2012-13. • Luciano Rigolini – Landscape, Buchmann Art Galerie, Lugano, 2015. Luciano Rigolini,"FOTOGRAFICA", Fondation d'Art Erich Lindenberg, Porza/Lugano, 2024/25

• La fotografia contemporanea della collezione Gernsheim, Magazzini del sale, Venezia, e Roemer-Museum, Hildesheim, 1995 • Architecture in black and white, Kunst- und Austellungshalle, der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, 1997 • Il San Gottardo come arteria, Galleria Gottardo, Lugano, 1997 • Icons: magnets of meaning, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1997 • Zürich-Ein Fotoprtrait, Kunsthaus Zürich, 1997 • Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, 2017 • Fotografia Europea-European Photography, Galleria Gottardo, Reggio Emilia, 2017 • Pendulum. Moving goods, moving people, Fondazione Mast, Bologna, 2018 • Moonstruck: Photographic Explorations, Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, 2019