Gusmano Cesaretti, is a self-taught photographer & artist from Lucca, Italy.
A resident of Los Angeles since 1969, Cesaretti has been capturing the sound, light, and emotional tenor of his adopted city through the lens of his camera.
One of the first photographers to document the East Los Angeles street culture as early as 1970, Cesaretti immersed himself in the Chicano lifestyle. His photographs of this era celebrated a sub-culture that had rarely been captured before. He curated numerous exhibitions, beginning with projects at his gallery Cityscape Foto Gallery, founded in Pasadena, California in 1977.
His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.) & the Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA (Los Angeles).
His work was featured in the 2010 groundbreaking show Art in the Streets at the Museum of Contemporary Art(MOCA), in Los Angeles, in which he was also actively involved in arranging major works by Los Angeles graffiti writers & dedicating a section of the exhibit to The Chosen Few motorcycle club.
From 2011-2014 he shot the documentary film Take None Give None, a portrait of The Chosen Few motorcycle club based in South Central Los Angeles.
In 2014 he began publishing Los Angeles FOTOFOLIO, an underground journal of exclusively black and white photographs by well-known and emerging photographers to visually stimulate those who had not been exposed to photography as an art form. Distributed as a free publication anywhere from institutions to housing projects in East Los Angeles and South Central, Los Angeles FOTOFOLIO has made its way into Europe and Asia.
Gusmano has played a vital role in creating the look & feel for many Hollywood films—working closely with directors Michael Mann, Tony Scott & Marc Foster.
