FABIO PAPARELLI
Fabio Paparelli is an Italian photographer and visual artist whose practice explores the space between fashion, intimacy and contemporary visual culture. For more than twenty years, he has developed a distinctive visual language through fashion photography, working between Rome, London and New York and collaborating with creatives, designers, stylists, models and international editorial platforms. His work has been published in publications including The Untitled Magazine and Spirit & Flesh Magazine.
While rooted in fashion, Paparelli’s practice has gradually moved beyond its conventions, using the photographic image as a means of exploring the body, femininity, desire, memory and identity. His work inhabits a space between fashion and contemporary art, where constructed images and lived experiences often become indistinguishable.
Women occupy a central position within this body of work. Some images emerge from personal encounters and moments lived; others take the form of imagined scenes, shaped by memory, desire and the passage of time. One recurring element is the deliberate concealment of the face. Rather than erasing identity, this gesture protects intimacy while opening the image to interpretation. By withholding the face, Paparelli shifts the figure away from individual portraiture and towards something more universal — a presence onto which the viewer can project their own memories, desires and associations.
This approach culminates in UNSEEN, a selection of photographs drawn from Paparelli’s archive and created over almost a decade. Presented at Sacripante Art Gallery in Rome, the project brings together experiences lived between London and New York, moving freely between fashion imagery, everyday encounters and autobiographical fragments. At its core lies an interest in what exists beyond the visible image: memory, desire, absence, distance, and the things that resist being fully articulated.
Paparelli has also extended his practice into film and video art. In 2011, while in London, he created The Modern Rebel, a short film examining the relationship between young people, self-image and the emergence of social media. Produced at an early moment in this cultural transformation, the film reflects on alienation and the construction of identity through images, anticipating themes that would become increasingly central to contemporary visual culture. The film was subsequently presented in Brooklyn as part of The Modern Rebel competition, where it received the final award.
Today, Paparelli continues to work across photography, fashion, portraiture, film and contemporary art. His images are characterised by a tension between presence and absence, revelation and concealment. Rather than offering complete narratives, they leave space for ambiguity — inviting the viewer to enter the image and complete what remains unseen.
Because sometimes, what is left unseen is what remains.
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