Giampaolo Sgura's gaze on the individual beauty of humans and their visceral emotions has marked his artistic direction and guided the distinctiveness of his photography, which has become world-renowned over the years. Grown up in Puglia in a family devoted to olive oil production, as a boy he lived in Berlin and Milan, where he studied architecture and sharpened an obsessive passion for photography and fashion.
The relationship between light, spaces and bodies, along with clothes and accessories from the fashion industry, are the tools through which Sgura fine-tunes his visual narrative dedicated to the emotional distinctiveness and singular beauty of his subjects. His multifaceted ability to represent the singular diversity of each individual and bring it into the frame of his own aesthetic recognition brings his work to magazines all over the planet.
Sgura's editorials and covers appear over the years in dozens of Vogue and GQ from countries around the world including France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia, Mexico, USA, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Portugal and Australia. Other publications include Teen Vogue, Allure, Icon, Arena Homme Plus, Vanity Fair, Vman. He has portraits many contemporary celebrities: Taylor Swift, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Lily-Rose Depp, Diane Lane, Ryan Gosling, Roger Federer, Cristiano Ronaldo, Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, Julianne Moore.
In his exhibitions Sgura brings out the influence of architecture meant as a place for emotions. Visitors spying nude photographs through the keyhole of giant doors and recreating an outsized living room (EXHIBITIONIST, 2023), viewers in the dark of an art warehouse scouting out with flashlights the piled-up photographs of naked bodies (YUMMY BOYS, 2022), an abandoned movie theater covered entirely with fashion photographs glued together like advertising posters (FOTOGRAFIE DI MODA, 2015), an abandoned construction site turned into a museum for oversized banners to depict portraits in their purity (CANTIERE, 2023).
Many global brands rely on his photography for their emotional communication, including: RALPH LAUREN, MOSCHINO, DOLCE&GABBANA, DSQUARED2, ESTÉE LAUDER, POMELLATO, MAXMARA, GIORGIO ARMANI, CHOPARD, ETRO, H&M, MANGO.