Franco Lanteri is part of a generation of photographers who were trained in the workshop. It's the 1950s: the era of paparazzi, Rolleiflex cameras. His work in a small town in Southern Italy included the whole range of social ceremonies such as weddings, birthdays, baptisms, but also passport photos and photographs of news events for the newspaper La Sicilia, mostly homicides (a trait reminiscent of Letizia Battaglia). The portraits are all done with an optical bench on 6×9 format negatives. The preparation of the plate, the setting up of lights in the studio, the posing, the manual retouching of the negative and the photo itself once printed, required long processing times, even several days. An unimaginable wait now. Even the oblique gaze of the subject, almost three-quarters facing, (right or left profile decided by the photographer depending on the greater photogenicity of one side of the face), the use of lights, black and white, are elements that contradict current standards of documentary photography in favor of an almost cinematic narrative.