Priscilla Rattazzi’s photographs reflect her life: her family, her friends, her dogs, her environment. With skill and devotion to her subjects she lets us enter a private world of beautiful children, human scale celebrities, aristocratic relatives, East Hampton and Palm Beach, and almost human animals.
Born in Rome into Italy’s glamorous Agnelli family, she has lived and worked in New York since her student days at Sarah Lawrence. As an apprentice to the great Japanese photographer Hiro in the late 1970s, she entered the world of fashion and portrait photography. Starting out on her own, she shot fashion for New York Magazine, Self, Redbook, and Vogue Italia. Motherhood shifted her focus to personal imagery. In Priscilla Rattazzi’s work, the charm and style of her life is pervasive. Celebrities and social figures such as Loulou de la Falaise, Diana Vreeland, and Gianni Agnelli are presented as friends and relatives, their warmth and familiarity coming across clearly in her work.
Priscilla Rattazzi has published four books and one portfolio: Best Friends (Rizzoli, 1989), a collection of famous and not so famous people with their dogs; Children (Rizzoli, 1992), a collection of photographs of children in early childhood; Georgica Pond (Callaway, 2000), a ten-year examination of a body of water on the East End of Long Island; Best Friends, the portfolio (LunaLola Press, 2006), a collection of Priscilla's favorite fourteen photographs from her book Best Friends; and Luna & Lola (Callaway, 2010), the story of her two dogs, a golden retriever and a miniature dachshund, woven as a metaphorical tale of family life. Gallery and Museum shows include Staley-Wise Gallery, Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, Tennessee, a series of portraits of actors, producers and directors for the Tribeca Film Festival; Valentina Moncada Gallery in Rome, Italy, and Paul Fisher Gallery in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Priscilla is currently working on an illustrated memoir.