Photographers Blog

Rome, Italy

By Tony Gentile

I have never before seen an electoral campaign based solely on the appearance of the main political leaders on television talk shows.

After disappearing from the national stage for about a year former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi now enters the houses of Italians every day, more than once a day, on the screens broadcast by the biggest TV channels. The same is happening with the others leaders including outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti.

They invade our television sets so much that one of the most important Italian satirical show decided to produce a special edition of the program called “Gli Sgommati, elektion edition”, produced by Palomar and broadcast by Sky.

I went to the studio to follow a day of filming and was really impressed by the job they were doing and entertained by their funny gags.

Bersani, Monti, Berlusconi, and other Italian political leaders and VIP were transformed in to big rubber puppets operated by actors. Each character was moved by three actors. One moved the body, the head and the mouth. The second moved only the hands and the third the eyes, pupils and eyelids. They moved simultaneously.

Milan, Italy

By Alessandro Garofalo

“Do you know how Ahamad Massoud died?”

It’s not a quiz but a question addressed to us a few days ago by an employee from the secretary of the Public Prosecutor’s office when we asked why photographers were not allowed to bring photographic equipment into the court during the trials involving the former dancer Maroc, Karima El Mahroug, better knew as Ruby Heartstealer, in the sexgate scandal with former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, accused of inciting the prostitution of a minor and abuse of power.

For a long time here in Milan we used to wait for Berlusconi and various protagonists of his different trials outside the courthouse because a measure prohibits filming in the courtroom for safety reasons.

But as we know, there is always someone who feels smart, especially when we talk about Italy – business is business. The channel networks want the scoop to broadcast in the news and the newspapers want to publish pictures on their front page. So, disregarding the bans, some editors and colleagues started to shoot video and take pictures with mobile phones, regardless of quality.