Claudio Abate (born 1943) Rome, Italy. He is very attached to, and still lives in Rome today. Already as a teenager he showed interest in the world of art and photography. The son of a painter who was friends with De Chirico, in 1955 he started his career as a photographer with Michelangelo Como in Via Margutta. He would later take over this studio and move it to Via del Babuino, at the time a fulcrum of activity in Roman culture. His portrait of Mario Schifano and his work with the Press Service Agency date from 1959. From 1961 to 1963 he worked for Life Magazine as assistant to Eric Lessing, one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency. During this same period he started to take photographs for the magazine Sipario, and hence became the endorser of the avant-garde theatre of Carmelo Bene, for whom he was to be stage photographer for eleven years.

Some shots taken during the staging of Christo ’63 date from 1963. He actively took part in the sixties scene and his photographs, as well as providing precious testimony, are often the only proof of events of which otherwise we would not have any record. Complex works of environmental art – hard to trace to a single point of view – are portrayed in a single, never celebrative image, in the attempt to capture the relationship between the work, the surroundings and the spectator. His photos at the Attico di Sargentini of Kounellis’ Horses (1969) are memorable; likewise the photo depicting Lo Zodiaco by Gino De Dominicis (1970): in this case Abate managed to grasp in a single shot the ellipse created by the objects and individuals on the stage set. In 1969 he took part in the "Septième Biennale de Paris" exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne.

After the so-called ‘hot years’ when he became the photographer/reader of avant-garde contemporary art, he experimented his own language. This led to his "Contatti con la superficie sensibile", comprising black and white works created through direct contact with light-sensitised photographic paper, presented at the Incontri internazionali d’Arte at Palazzo Taverna in Rome in 1972.

In 1977 he took part in the "Fotografi e Fotografie" group exhibition curated by Italo Mussa in Rome. And it was in this city that in 1979 he was to hold his first personal exhibition, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, at the Centro Culturale dell’Immagine, Il Fotogramma. In the same year in Bologna, at Studio Cavalieri, again Bonito Oliva was to present La malattia dell’occhio where Abate introduced the typical anamorphic twist used in painting to the field of image. Dating from 1983 is his Il Progetto per un monumento al cinema, not a photograph as such, but a complex work comprising an enormous silhouette of Michelangelo Antonioni contact printed with frames from one of the director’s full-length films. In the 1980s he approached colour for the first time, and while retaining his intimate dialogue with the work and the artists, he abandoned loyal descriptions of reality to highlight its mystery.

Dating from 1986 are the solo exhibition "Contatti a occhio nudo", at Galleria Ugo Ferranti in Rome and a fundamental photographic work on the works of Joseph Beuys: the project, strongly desired by Beuys’ wife, was created after the artist’s death and the photographs were put on display for the first time in 2006 at Galleria dell’Oca in Rome in "Claudio Abate: Block Beuys".

Over the years, his work alongside artists has not diminished by any means: after moving to the district of San Lorenzo in Rome, in the 1980s he started to associate with what was defined as the ‘La Nuova Scuola Romana’. In the post-modern climate of those years, Abate established a close relationship with the so-called ‘Neue Wilden’, in particular with Markus Lupertz and A.R. Penk, later becoming their personal photographer.

Instead in 1987 he took part in group exhibitions at the Stux Gallery in New York, and in the "Colombella Premio Florenzi 87, VIII" photographic exhibition, held at the Centro Studi at Villa La Colombella; and in 1988, at the Galleria Civica in Modena, he took part in "Storie dell’occhio/1, Fotografi ed eventi artistici in Italia dal ’60 all’80" and in "D’apres Man Ray", at Galleria Il Fotogramma, Rome–London.