Born in Milan, Mario Troiani has been deeply involved in photography since the age of 13. After receiving a degree in computer science and working for two years in software development, Troiani began doing travel photography full time, spending two years in India, Indonesia, and China. His photos from that period appeared in a number of travel magazines, including De Agostini, Gente Viagge, Dove and Terre Sauvage. Next, he spent four months in Lapland as official photographer in a scientific research team that was assessing the impact of the Chernobyl disaster on the food chain. His subsequent career as a freelance photographer took him throughout Europe and beyond (including Brazil and Morocco). One product of this period was his photographic contributions to the Italian travel guidebook Istituto Geografico de Agostini. Beyond photography, Troiani periodically took on projects in computer science, including working on software development in the field of artificial intelligence. Starting in 1996, he spent twelve years as head of a project using digitalization technology to restore classic Italian movies, involving intricate work with original copies, on behalf of such film companies as Medusa Film, Istituto Luce, MovieTime, and Warner Brothers. The films he restored encompassed the major directors of the postwar era, including Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Rossellini, Lizzani, and many others. This period ended when Troiani pursued his future wife, the Israeli Ilana Bazini, to Israel, where he made Aliya and began to study Hebrew. Seeing Israel with the fresh perspective of an immigrant from Italy, while capturing that vision with the experience of decades of professional photography, has occupied Troiani ever since, culminating in the “The Sounds of Tel Aviv” exhibit.
This exhibit was inspired by Troiani’s observation of street musicians, whose artistry, and audiences, evoked the city’s cultural diversity. One can see in his photos the striking differences, for example, between Russian and South American musicians, in body language, in the intimate handling of their instruments, in their different ways of interacting with the public. Those multifaceted distinctions are embedded in another set of sensory impressions, in which the sounds of the street musicians combine with the seashore crash of waves and staccato of matkot, or with the urban cacophony produced by everything from intense traffic to the outbursts of children at play. Alongside the musicians themselves, the portrait of Tel Aviv is completed by Troiani’s eye for the audience, individuals from a host of backgrounds, drawn in by the universal language of music.