Franco Vaccari, the conceptual artist and art theorist, has died.
His work invariably involved the participation of the public. At the 1972 Venice Biennale he installed a photo booth and attached a passport-style self-portrait he made with the machine to the gallery wall. Titled Real-time exposure #4. Leave a photographic trace of your passage on the walls, visitors were then encouraged to take their own portraits to add to the display.
Vaccari was born in Modena, Italy, and his earliest works involved photographing the city’s graffiti, which he regarded as a form of found poetry. He likewise saw the photographic image not as a mode of representation but a way of producing traces or marks of presence. In 1972 he was invited to take part in the seventh International Painting Week at Neue Galerie in Graz. Driving from Italy, Vaccari photographed his journey from the window of the car, showing the results as 700 km of exhibition Modena Graz, the first of a series of what he termed ‘exhibitions in real time’.
Duchamp was a touchstone for Vaccari, and the subject of many of his well regarded essays. He published ‘Duchamp and the Concealment of Work’ in 1978 and ‘Photography and the technological unconscious’ a year later, both considered fundamental critiques on contemporary photography.
Vaccari exhibited at the Venice Biennale again in 1980 and 1993. In 2026 a retrospective is due to be staged at Museion in Bolzano.
