Mattia Vacca
Prospekt Photographers
Como, CO, Italia
Mattia Vacca is a freelance photojournalist and a documentary photographer.
For ten years, he was a daily contributor for Corriere della Sera covering breaking news stories in Northern Italy.
He is currently working on various personal projects focused on social issues and the consequences of armed conflicts around the world.
He is the founder of the independent publishing house Delicious Editions. His first photobook “A winter’s tale” came out in 2014, in 2018 he published the photobook “Confine”; a collective narrative about how the city of Como, on the border between Switzerland and Italy, became a refugee camp.
In 2018 he joins Prospekt Agency.
His work has been featured on New Republic, The Guardian, The Independent, Die Zeit, Wired, BBC, Vice, Vanity Fair, among the others.
He received numerous awards, including Sony World Photography Awards, Royal Photographic Society Awards, Unesco Humanity Photo Awards, New York Photo Awards.
His photographs have been exhibited in galleries and festivals worldwide.
He was also a TEDx speaker.
- Arts
- Breaking news
- Crisis
- Editorial
- Events
- Military embed
- Portrait
- Reporting
- Video editing
- English
- Spanish
- French
- Italian
The forgotten war of Nagorno Karabakh
Mattia Vacca
Soldiers are engaged in defending their positions over the frontline, although in May 1994 an official ceasefire was also signed by Armenia and negotiations are taking place in Moscow. The ceasefire is regularly broken with casualties on both sides. Few days ago one of the Artsakh young soldiers was injured and transferred to Yerevan’s hospital where his life is still in on risk.
The conflict started in 1988 and escalated into full-scale war when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Armenians went to war with Azerbaijan, with backing from Armenia. The conflict left 65,000 ethnic Armenians and 40,000 ethnic Azeris displaced.
The border territory is now full of military camps and bases. In the capital Stepanakert a military academy substituted the traditional high-school. That forgotten war seems to be still not finished today.
How to act in extreme situations
Mattia Vacca
The aggressive Russian stances towards the Baltic States and the military activity within the bordering Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, has recently prompted the Lithuanian army to resume military conscription. The ultimate goal is building an operational self-defence force if a Russian aggression becomes reality. Lithuania will recruit and train military personnel for the next five years starting in September 2015, enlisting 3,000 people, aged 19 to 27. The great majority of them -about 2,600 recruits- have joined voluntarily.