Cesare Bossi, Cesare Bossi. The shift of technologies, dal dye transfer a Piezography, racconti e incontri., 2023

Cesare Bossi has spent, with granitic dedication, over forty years in experimenting with the techniques of photographic printing and founded in Florence the ACSAF (Archivio Contemporaneo Stampa d’Arte Fotografica), which today constitutes a precious and unexplored mine of now unobtainable materials and tools, unique prints and technical proofs, as well as a treasure trove of papers of all kinds and formats. His technical and artistic journey has made its way into the world of photographic art printing from a workshop he opened in the 1980s on Terme Street, which he calls “a craft workshop dedicated to photography,” going so far as to receive commissions from the United States and reaching as far as China or Russia to show the results of research to professionals and amateurs who came even from Siberia.

In these pages Bossi tells how he experimented and delved into a wide variety of analog printing techniques, moving from chemists to silver printing, from the dye transfer system to Piezography inks for digital printing. He was guided in this relentless pursuit-which led him, almost without realizing it, to the invention of the new brush printing method-by an unwavering belief that printing is an integral and indispensable part of the photographic process.

The technical challenges of the profession and the friendships and collaborations born in the darkroom-with companies such as Kodak, Ilford, Canon and with well-known photographers such as Luigi Ghirri, Joel-Peter Witkin, Ansel Adams and Alberto Bevilacqua -, also witnessed by a selection of letters illustrated in the volume, are interwoven in an engaging narrative in which facts, encounters and anecdotes almost take on the tone of adventure, restoring the atmosphere of years when experimenting in photographic printing in Italy meant clashing with the dynamics of the market and multinational corporations, but also moving into territories that were still untrodden and fertile for extraordinary new achievements.