Andrea Quarantotto’s Up and Coming Style

Last year, when he was just 21 years old, Bolognese fashion editor Andrea Quarantotto founded Up-and-Coming Style, a photography webzine dedicated to fashion in all its facets. Inspired by visual arts his whole life, Quarantotto picked up a camera this past March, and began cementing his place beside his heroes.

“I went from theory to practice,” he explains to us of his entry into photography. “Like a teenager in 1977 inspired by the punk scene to pick up an instrument and play, to express that exciting musical period. I understood that to really express what I had in my head I needed to shoot the photos myself, in order to represent the concepts that I held internally. All this started in March of this year, before that I didn’t feel the need at all to take photos.”

Despite never having dreamt of a career behind the lens, Quarantotto’s list of inspiring figures is thorough and diverse. He rattles off names like Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Ellen Von Unwerth, linking the seemingly disparate figures with the observation that “something many of them have in common is massive use of flash photography, and it’s something I adore, since it’s a tool which allows you to distort reality and conceptualize it in a more raw and authentic way.”

Flash photography, Quarantotto tells us, is not valued in his home of Bologna, a place that he says was “an important cultural center for Italy in the post-war period, [but] is now suffering from a real artistic paralysis.”

“In terms of fashion photography I’m afraid things are very insular and provincial here…The publication Up-and-Coming Style came out of the desire to release Bologna from the paralysis that has set in here recently on the photographic front. I don’t deny that there are plenty of people interested in the city’s underground and subcultures, but there is no kind of unity, and so one of the project’s objectives was to bring them together.”

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  Andrea Quarantotto