About – Ugo Villani

About Ugo Villani

Ugo Villani (b. 1978) is an architect and photographer based in Salerno, Italy. He graduated in Architectural Design from the “Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II” and has worked since 2008 at Villani Architecture Studio in Salerno, focusing on architectural design, interior renovation and custom furniture design.

He came to photography around 2008, driven by the same curiosity that guides his work in architecture and graphic composition. Black and white soon became his main language: a way of stripping the image down to light, geometry and the fragile presence of people inside the urban space.

His work brings together architecture, street photography, urban landscape and everyday rituals. Cities like Salerno, Naples, Istanbul and Valencia become laboratories where he looks for tensions between order and chaos, design and improvisation, sacred processions and ordinary life. Influenced early on by authors such as Luigi Ghirri and Gabriele Basilico, over time he has developed a personal way of using contrast, reflections and architectural structures to suggest small, incomplete narratives rather than closed stories.

His photographs have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and featured in sector magazines, including publications from the series “Shadow Chronicles” in Bestselected and DOCU Magazine. He also collaborates with cultural collectives and festivals that explore the dialogue between photography, architecture and the contemporary city.

Phylosophy

In a densified time, I shoot to grasp and rework the world.
Where architecture becomes texture and human presence becomes breath,
I find the measure of my gaze.