In Cambi Auction House's upcoming Photography Auction to be held on July 6, 2023, photographs will tell the story of this media, with photographic shots and works by progenitors and experimenters, starting from the late 1800s, moving through iconic photographs of the 1900s, to the works of contemporary artists and traversing history and major international events. Artists in the auction include Aleksandr Michajlovic Rodcenko, but also some very important Italian photographers, including Franco Fontana, Mario Giacomelli, artists who used photography for their research in the 1970s-80s, such as Michele Zaza, along with contemporary artists such as Vanessa Beecroft and Francesco Vezzoli.

Top Lot in the auction: a work by Francesco Vezzoli, an authentic masterpiece and unique work, namely Cassandra Crying which is an embroidered photograph, a typical style Vezzoli uses. The work was created ad hoc for Vanity Fair magazine, which used it as the cover of a special 2016 issue.

Cassandra Crying is one of the fundamental works of Francesco Vezzoli's artistic career and fully represents the soul of his research between the sacred and the profane, austere and frivolous, ancient and modern. Inspired by a 1971 shot by Francesco Scavullo that immortalizes Sophia Loren, an iconic character of the collective imagination, Vezzoli distorts its essential characteristics by reinventing an aesthetic of tears and glamour. Indeed, it is in the process of recovering craft activities and using different techniques that the artist's work unfolds. Cassandra Crying/Sophia Loren in her being together Diva, film character, shot by Scavullo, weeping embroidered golden tears on canvas print, active in the eyes of the beholder innumerable visual and intellectual stimuli, creating a totally new art form.

As Stefano Tronchi says, speaking of the collaboration between the two Francescos: “These images are not simple photographs, not even for a moment, but a contamination between cinema, fashion and art, one that merges into the other, in the inevitable equation of all Vezzoli's works”. (Cristiana Perrella, edited by, Francesco Vezzoli, Rizzoli publisher, Milan, 2016, pg. 77).

Vezzoli recalls personal and common memory starting from a photograph with a strong evocative power, which he gives new life using expressive tools, sometimes dichotomous, which blur the boundaries between media, photography and applied arts.