Pablo Volta

Desulo, Feast of Our Lady of the Snow. Photograph by Pablo Volta, 1956

Pablo Volta was born in Buenos Aires in 1926. At the end of the Second World War, which saw him as a partisan on the side of the Americans, he joined his journalist father in Berlin for a few months. Here he buys a camera and takes his first shots, immortalizing the city completely devastated by the bombings.
Back in Italy, he deals with crime stories for newspapers such as “Milano Sera”.
In 1950 he left for Rome: at Cinecita he collaborated on some short films and participated in the making of “The White Sheikh” by Fellini.
After this period, with his friend Franco Pinna and with Plinio De Martiis, Caio Garrubba and Nicola Sansone, he founded the “Associated Photographers”, the first cooperative of photographers in Italy, an experience that ended after about a year due to lack of economic means.
In December 1954, intrigued by the famous “Inquiry into Orgosolo” by the Sicilian anthropologist Franco Cagnetta and the issues related to banditry, he arrived in Sardinia, in Orgosolo; here he discovered a new world, bloody but intact in values and traditions, by which he remains deeply fascinated.
In 1957 he went to Mamoiada, where he took the first photographs of the carnival. These, together with those of Orgosolo, will constitute the iconographic apparatus of the volume “Bandits d'Orgosolo”, the first edition of Cagnetta's investigation, published in France in 1963.
His images of Sardinia, with those of Franco Pinna's Lucania, will pave the way in Italy for ethnophotography, a genre hitherto little considered but which in the following years will be widely distributed.
After moving to Paris, he will continue to work in the news for newspapers, especially for “Il Mondo” by Pnunzio. The portraits of celebrities from the artistic and cinematographic world taken during this period are particularly interesting. After a long experience at the RAI headquarters in Paris as an operator, his love for Sardinia and Sardinian muralism led him to settle permanently in San Sperate.

Update

31/3/2026 - 11:06