Emiliano Mancuso. A Different Kind of Beauty, edited by Renata Ferri, ContrastoBooks, was awarded by Grin (Gruppo Redattori Iconografici) as the best photography book at the Ponchielli Prize’s XVI. https://www.grinphotoeditor.it/premio-ponchielli/premio-ponchielli-2020/

Raffaele Vertaldi, photo editor and GRIN member. For reorganizing, synthesizing, and organizing a complex and multifaceted work, and for reshaping three projects that seemed to have already found their final form. For bringing together diverse materials—photos and stills, diaries and texts (old and new), memories and hopes—in a book that is much more than the sum of its parts. For providing the opportunity to know—or recognize—an author who left us too soon, and for demonstrating that it’s never too late to appreciate the meaning of a photograph. For reflecting Emiliano Mancuso’s civic commitment with dedication, his personal and professional generosity with generosity, and his enthusiasm for life and the lives of others.

Renata Ferri, photo editor, journalist, and book curator. Emiliano would be delighted, honored, and I am very happy, very proud, because it’s a book I’ve put effort, passion, a lot of heart, and a lot of love into. I tried to unite Emiliano’s three bodies of work, to introduce the photographer, the man. To give those who didn’t know him an opportunity to meet him, and for those who knew him, an object to remember him by. Emiliano died in 2018, at the age of 46. He had somewhat abandoned photography and devoted himself entirely to documentary filmmaking. He made two films, one of which is Felix’s Diary, which I’ve brought into this book through the stills and the diary he kept during the two years of work. I believe this book captures a human experience, the journey of an extremely generous man who truly told the story of Italy through photography and film. He was definitely a militant photographer who suffered enormously from the disasters of this country, but at the same time loved it madly. He traveled up and down the city, revealing its difficulties, but above all, the diverse beauty of individuals, the faces of their problems, always seeking the human being, always putting people, their micro-stories, at the center, delving into marginality to then construct a fresco of suffering humanity, viewed with rare compassion. A sincere thank you to this jury for highlighting and giving us the opportunity to get to know Emiliano Mancuso.