Massimo Vitali is most well known for his series of beach scene photographs in Italy begun in the early 1990s. Vitali has been doing this for a few years now, and has perfected his technique. He sets up his custom-made perch 20 to 30 feet in the air, frames the landscape background he plans to capture with his large format camera, and then waits for the landscape to fill up with people and their individual dramas. The images are crowded and dense and rich with banal detail. Groups of people congregate closely together — trying to relax or play — while wedged on a strip of beach, the margin between land and sea, at seaside resorts or against a backdrop of looming industrial structures.

Massimo Vitali was born in Como, Italy, in 1944. He studied photography at the London College of Printing. He first worked as a photojournalist starting in the 1960s, working with many magazines and agencies in Italy and in Europe. His meeting with Simon Guttmann, the founder of the agency Report, was key to his development as a concerned photographer. In the 1980s, feeling doubts about the limitations of photography lead him to take up cinematography, working in narrative ficiton and advertising. But he never gave up the still image, and in 1995 commenced his beach series which has established his international reputation as a major fine art photographer. Vitali's chosen perspective for these and related works is from a platform up to four or five meters high, while using large-format film cameras which allow him to capture high-resolution details over a broad expanse in everyday scenes on the beach, at pool- or lakeside, at ski resorts, and on the streets or in the squares of destination cities around the world. He lives and works in Lucca, Italy.