Roberto Roberti creates hand-crafted photographic prints using 19th-century alternative processes—platinum-palladium, cyanotype, Vandyke brown, and gum bichromate. Based in Parma, Italy, his journey is deeply rooted in painting, the graphic arts, and the legacy of Pictorialism, driven by the belief that art resides in the vision rather than the medium.
His work has been exhibited in a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Photography in Brescia, Italy, and featured in Outdoor Photography Magazine, Landscape Photography Magazine (cover artist, 2022), Black and White Minimalism Magazine, and Fuji X Passion (interview and portfolio).
Working exclusively in black and white, he focuses primarily on timeless landscapes and sacred architecture, using long exposures to transform these subjects into visions that exist beyond immediate perception. His approach merges Japanese aesthetic principles (wabi-sabi, the beauty of impermanence, and Yūgen) with the awe of the Romantic Sublime, where nature and sacred spaces are experienced as contemplative realms and negative space acts as a threshold for the imagination.
To close this creative circle, as an official member of the Gruppo Rodolfo Namias (the Italian Alternative Photographic Processes Association), each print is produced entirely by hand in a traditional darkroom. The images are hand-coated with light-sensitive salts—including specialized gold and selenium toning for archival permanence—and contact-printed using natural UV light on premium art papers and traditional Japanese Washi. This deep physical materiality yields a tonal range that digital media cannot emulate, ensuring that no edition exceeds 5 copies.