About Us

Scuola della Luce was founded with the desire to explore light: to study it, work with it, and make it a medium for artistic experimentation. Light is what makes vision possible, the essential condition for seeing. It has long been a metaphor for knowledge itself—we speak of shedding light on something, seeing clearly, or having a bright idea. At the same time, light is also the spark that is ignited when two minds connect, when an idea passes from one person to another and sets something in motion.

This is the light at the heart of Scuola della Luce: the material of image-making, but also what comes alive through encounter, curiosity, and the desire to better understand the world and ourselves.

Founded by photographer Paolo Verzone and artist Jordi Bernadó, Scuola della Luce has brought together an international community of photographers, artists, filmmakers, writers, and thinkers around this shared vision.

Exchange is the principle that underpins everything. Every activity begins with the meeting between an author and those taking part, and grows through a mutual exchange: each person brings their own way of seeing, their own questions, and their own way of engaging with the world. It is through this cross-pollination that everyone leaves with a broader perspective.

In practice, this vision takes four forms. Workshops place an author's work and perspective alongside those of the participants. Journeys use travel as a way of learning how to see. Events, the school's most open and informal gatherings, bring photography into conversation with other arts and forms of expression. Studio Visits invite participants into an author's workspace to discover the person behind the images.

Over the years, these encounters have brought together a wide range of voices, including Laia Abril, Myriam Boulos, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Ismail Ferdous, and many others. What unites them is not a shared style or technique, but a common understanding of photography—and of art more broadly—as something to be shared, explored, and shaped together through genuine exchange.

Meet the team

Paolo Verzone

For nearly thirty years, Paolo Verzone has documented the world through long-term photographic projects, many of which have unfolded over the course of decades. From Seeuropeans (1994–2002), exploring Europeans on the continent's beaches, to the Moscow Project, in which he has photographed Moscow every ten years since 1991; from his work on cadets at European military academies, published by French publisher La Martinière in 2014, to his ongoing exploration of the Arctic, whose first chapter, Spitzbergen, was published in 2022 by the German publisher Mare Verlag.

A three-time World Press Photo winner, his work has appeared in publications including National Geographic, Time, and Le Monde. His photographs are part of the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. He is a Canon Ambassador and, since 2024, a National Geographic Explorer.