It came as a real shock as I caught up with my reading online today to learn of the death of Daniel Tamagni, someone I still thought of as a young photographer, born in Milan in 1975 and only 42 when he died last month, and who I first heard of and met in 2007 , the year when he won the Canon Young Photographer Award for his series on ‘The Gentlemen of Bacongo‘, African dandies or ‘Sapeurs‘
I met him first at around that time at a show he had with two others in Peckham, writing about it for this web site, Peckham Rising, where he showed me a newspaper article on his work on Black Churches in the area, one image from which was in the show, and I was sorry to have missed the earlier show he had of that work.
I wrote about him again when his work on the ‘Sapeurs’ was on show at the Michael Hoppen Gallery and my piece Sapology included the picture of him with Araminta De Clermont, whose pictures were also showing in the gallery. The work had by then gained him the 2010 ICP award for Applied Fashion photography, and had been published by Trolley Books (Gentlemen of Bacongo, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-904563-83-9.) As well as writing a little about the Sapeurs and Tamagni’s pictures of them I was also pleased to be able to photograph one of them in person at the event.
I used that picture again when I wrote another piece, Encore Sapeurs, following on from a post by Joerg Colberg on his on Conscientious blog which linked to some of Tamagni’s work.
My last meeting with Daniele was at the opening of ‘Global Style Battles‘ at the ArtEco Gallery in Wandsworth (now the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery), an enjoyable occasion graced by the presence of a number of leading photographers who live in London, including James Barnor (with him above) born in Ghana and Charlie Phillips, born in Jamaica (below).
It was a memorable night and you can read about it and see a few more pictures at Daniele Tamagni at ArtEco.
You can read a brief obituary of him, as I did, on PDN Pulse, and, in Italian, in Corriere della Sera.