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Anna Arnone (Photographer)
Text drawn from biography, 2003:
Born in 1960 in Tynemouth to an Italian mother and Sicilian father and having worked extensively as a documentary photographer with the Anglo-Jamaican community, in the mid-1980s, Anna was developing an interest in documenting some aspects of her own cultural background. She began documenting Italians in London, concentrating on activities around the Italian churches in Brixton and Clerkenwell, in London. Anna also started making regular trips to Italy around, this time to document religious festivals. Her aim was to try to explore an anachronistic aspect of modern day Italy, in that the lives of Italians of her own generation, whose parents had remained in Italy, were not as rooted in religious tradition and rules as their parents’ lives had been. In both the Italian documentary work shot in the UK and Italy, Anna included a large element of portraiture and, very quickly, sought to produce work that did reflect the changing face of the Italian community at home, in Italy, and abroad, within the expatriate Italian communities in England.