Born in Como in 1944, Massimo Vitali studied photography at the London College of Printing. Beginning in the sixties Vitali worked as a photojournalist, collaborating with magazines and agencies throughout Europe, before turning to cinematography for television and cinema in the early eighties. He eventually returned to still photography as an artist, taking up large-format photography in 1993 and beginning his famous “Beach Series” in 1995. Steidl has published Vitali’s Landscape with Figures (2004) and Landscape with Figures / Natural Habitats, 1994–2009 (2011).