I am Simone Padovani, a documentary photographer, community psychologist, researcher and trainer, based in Venice. The two halves are not a coincidence. My degree thesis, back in 2007, was on Photovoice: a method that hands the camera to the people being studied, so they can describe their own reality. Everything I have done since comes from that idea. I photograph the world, and I help the people inside it photograph it themselves.

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PHOTOGRAPHY

My photographs are distributed worldwide through Getty Images and have appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, the BBC and Forbes, among many other leading titles. In February 2024 my work on the glass masters of Murano earned the cover and lead story of National Geographic Italia. What that means in practice is that I know what a picture desk needs and when it needs it. I have photographed Nobel laureates such as Annie Ernaux and Wole Soyinka to writers, thinkers and public figures, and survivors of abuse across Europe, and the work has to hold up in the same way every time. My long form projects follow the same thread wherever I find it: the bond between people and the land they live on, from the tribes of Odisha to the Po plain, from the Dolomites to the craftspeople of Venice, tribal communities in Odisha and fishermen in the Po delta and in Scotland.  

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RESEARCH AND METHOD

As a community psychologist I have pioneered Photovoice in Italy since 2007, and I decline it by purpose: research, mapping, engagement, social change. From this work came Photo Story, adopted by the European Commission for the EU Climate Pact, now used across Europe by people I have never met, which is the only real proof that a method works. It also means I do not arrive with a fixed formula. I build the method around your question, your group and your constraints, and I am accountable for what it produces.

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TRAINING

For nearly twenty years I have trained, and what I train is not photography, it is change: how a group builds a shared vision and finds the power to act on it. Atlas Copco, Enel, the Veneto Region, the National Research Council, the European Commission, and universities from Padua, where the collaboration has lasted two decades, to Roma Tre, Federico II and La Sapienza. Very different rooms, and each of them wanted a result, not a workshop. That is what I am hired for, and what I deliver.

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COMMITMENT

My work has never stopped at the image. I am Director of the Italy Hub of the Justice Initiative, the European campaign whose work led to Resolution 2533 of the Council of Europe, which calls on its 46 member states to recognise and repair child abuse in institutions, and through which my project SHAME gave a face to survivors across Europe. I am a founder and board member of ECA Global, active in more than forty countries, and its European representative to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. I serve on the board of ECPAT Italia, and I am an Ambassador of the EU Climate Pact. I believe photography carries a responsibility, not only to show the world, but to help change it.

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HOW I WORK

I choose slowness when a story deserves it, and I can be fast when the work demands it: I have filed features in a day and covered assignments at short notice, to standard. What does not change is the rest. I agree on the objective before I start, and I am judged on reaching it. I spend time with people before I photograph them, because trust comes first and the photograph second, and it is what lets me make an honest portrait of a public figure and, with the same care, hold the dignity of someone at their most vulnerable. Nobody has ever regretted letting me into a room.

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I still photograph for the same reason I began: to understand something I did not understand before, and to let others see it too.

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