Paolo Ventura: Winter Stories #19 (Full Moon), 2007 (Digital C-Print 40 x 50" ed of 5)

Images by Paolo Ventura, who is represented in the United States by Hasted Kraeutler. Ventura, who grew up in a small village in northern Italy, constructs extremely detailed dioramas of city scenes and then photographs them so that they appear life-size.Paolo Ventura: Winter Stories #23 (11:55 p.m.), 2007 (Digital C-print 40 x 50" ed of 5)
Paolo Ventura: Automaton #6, 2010 (Digital C-Print 40 x 50" ed of 5)

The scenes are based on stories set in Italy in the 1940s and '50s. Last month when I was in New York, his Automaton series was on view at Hasted Kraeutler; it centers around a watchmaker in the Jewish ghetto in 1943 Venice who builds an automaton to keep him company after all his friends are gone.Paolo Ventura: Automaton #10, 2010 (Digital C-Print 40 x 50" ed of 5)

The lighting blows my mind — looking at the images, you remind yourself that they're photos of dioramas, but you can almost feel yourself in the cold or the fog or the noon-time sun.Paolo Ventura: Winter Stories #39 (Before the Rain), 2007 (Digital C-print 40 x 50" ed of 5)
I first saw his work in Harper's magazine several years ago and taped the images into one of my black books. It was cool to see them in person, huge. Click Hasted Kraeutler and Paolo Ventura's website for more images.