Cesare Bossi, The shift of tecnologies, dal Dye Transfer a Piezography. Racconti ed incontri. published by Centro Di, with Gabriele Maschio

The shift of tecnologies, dal Dye Transfer a Piezography. Racconti ed incontri tells in first-person the story of Cesare Bossi, a photography printer.

His fine art photo lab, the ACSAF in Viale Volta in Florence, becomes since the late 1980s a crossroads where heterogeneous figures and dynamics of the Italian and international photographic universe converge: from prints for collectors and museums to those for the medium-high end commercial market, from the relationship with manufacturers of photographic or dedicated papers, to suppliers of chemicals or, more recently, of printing inks and pigments.

The book’s framework is very broad, complex, counter – verse. The study, the arrangement, a possible historicization of these dynamics (in the book channeled subjectively into the vital flow of autobiography), hint at a possible, and suggestive, history of photography starting from printing labs. The book is also a firsthand account of how fine art printing has dealt with the shift from the analog, chemical industry to a digital, electronic one, with their elements of continuity and ruptures.

Cesare’s work is currently directed toward the Archive, produced over the years by bringing together prints by different authors but close in the need for control toward the printing of their own work. 
The confrontation with the printer influenced the photographers’ expressive choices, directing him to refine the technique towards  the desired printing result. Among the others, Cesare Bossi’s lab was attended by Paolo Gioli, Luigi Ghirri, Giovanni Gastel, Richard Nieto, Peter Korda, Peter Witkin, Ewa Mari Johansson, Occhiomagico, Emanuele Menniti Paraito, and Mario Ciampi. Many prints are one-of-a-kind and unrepeatable pieces, some are personal research traveled and approved by the author.

From the activity of printing and the cultural movement generated around the lab were also born the experiences of 1992 – 1996 with the City of Fiesole (FI), at the Palazzina Magnani and the exhibitions on European art photography, the workshops in Shanghai and at the Fine Art Academy in Beijing; in 2011, the exhibition The language of modern print and the catalog at Rosphoto in St. Petersburg; from 2015 to 2019 in Massa Marittima (GR), at the former convent of the Poor Clares, which saw Dominique Stroobant, the Santa Fè school, Offo Festival in Katowitze in Poland converge, becoming an international reference point for pinhole photography.