Pino Ninfa is an Italian documentary photographer specializing international social issues and music.
A Sicilian native, he moved to Milan when he was 17 and has been based there since.
The core of his work has always revolved around raising awareness on social and environmental issues and promoting cooperation initiatives all over the world. He has provided memorable contributions with missions in African forests and Amazonia, as well as Haiti, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, India, Nepal, Cambodia and South Africa, to name but a few.
His work often documents development projects aimed at supporting struggling local communities, with a particular focus on the challenging conditions of women. He collaborates with several highly respected Italian NGOs for projects on solidarity.
He is passionate about jazz - for over twenty years a significant component of his production has revolved around photographing prestigious jazz festivals and events all over Italy and abroad.
His commercial work includes clients such as Porsche Italia, Fiat Iveco and Level Fabergè, among many others, for whom he created imagery for advertising and social responsibility campaigns.
He has been leading workshops both in Italy and internationally for many years, based on different ways of conceiving the role of photography depending on the circumstances.
He has led groups in his native Sicily, to document religious festivities throughout the year, as well as in many locations all over Italy - often in less well-known but very unique places, generally in connection with musical or cultural events.
In 2012 he took a group of Italians to New York to work on the jazz scene in the City. That year he worked in Cape Town with the kids in the Philippi Township; in 2013 he was in Lima, with local University students, working on a documentary project on the Cono Sur area, where child sexual exploitation is constantly growing. More recently, he led a project in Brazil with people who live on the street, and with the Fabricas di Culturas in the favelas. In 2017 he started a new project in Eritrea, a former Italian colony, on the footsteps of Italian mestizos and of rationalist architecture in that country.
His work has been shown in museums and galleries in many Italian cities.
He has published more than ten books, mostly on jazz, including a reportage on a jazz-centric road trip from new Orleans to New York, but also on land mines in Cambodia, the conditions in Ethiopia and South Africa, and tango dancing in Argentina.
