The world of Maria Vittoria Backhaus
is made up of many stories.
V
m
b
A documentary project by Sara Tirelli.
Her photographs are never an end to themselves, they are captured moments,
part of a more complex script.
She is a prominent figure in the scene of Italian photography. Her works are published in major Italian and International fashion and design magazines. She also works on advertising campaigns and catalogues for the beauty, fashion and design industries.
She graduated in theatre design at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, before starting her career as a photographic reporter of news, cultural and political events, beat singers in the mid-sixties. Later on, she changed to studio work, shooting mainly interiors and still-life, but soon beginning also with fashion. This meant a passage from small and medium cameras in black and white to color pictures in large format, shot with a Swiss Sinar 4 x 5 inches and a wooden American Deardorff 8 x 10 inches, which she also normally used for fashion shooting. For almost ten years, until the end of the nineties, a great part of her work, in particular the fashion pictures, was realized in big-colour Polaroid films (Polaroid 809). The brief but intense work with fashion designer Walter Albini and the long collaboration with Vogue and other monthly magazines, both falling in this period, had a relevant role in her professional development. In the same period, she also used the SX Polaroid, developing the technique of mounting and rephotographing the resulting composition of a lot of shots to arrive at the final image.
Then, in the late nineties, another big change: she wanted to experience the collaboration with a more popular weekly magazine. And so, for over ten years, she worked regularly for Io Donna where besides fashion, still-life and interiors, she created a new way of photographing food.
During the last years, she also began to explore personal photographic research, to save (rescue?) the massive analogic and digital archive.
In 2021 she received the ARTURO GHERGO career award. In 2023 during the MONFEST in Casale Monferrato an anthological exhibition has shown her 50 years of photograpy.