Giovanni Gallio is a photographer based in Verona who founded Athleta and publishes it through his studio Rise Up. The magazine launched with a cover image of Bebe Vio — the Italian Olympic fencer who lost all four limbs to meningitis at age eleven, then built a career in wheelchair fencing and a non-profit supporting children with prostheses. Her prosthetic legs, photographed with the intimacy and compositional care of a portrait rather than a news image, announced exactly what kind of sports publication this would be: one that looks at athletic bodies not as machines to be ranked but as stories to be told.
Now ten issues deep, Athleta is an independent photographic publication from Italy that treats sport as art and culture. Each issue contains only six to eight long-form photo stories, giving each narrative 140 to 176 pages of space on uncoated paper. The subjects range from bodybuilding contests inside the Eastern New York Correctional Facility (photographed by Joseph Rodriguez) to the centuries-old Iranian wrestling ritual of Zurkhaneh, from ice sailing on frozen Wisconsin lakes to youth boxing in the suburbs of Catania, from the democratic golfing greens of a Madrid neighbourhood to a cycling tour through Sierra Leone. Sara Capovilla’s intimate portrait series on skier Alessandro Pittin, which captures both his extraordinary athletic ability and his absolute ordinariness, represents what Gallio calls the magazine’s manifesto.
The texts are short and deliberately subordinate to the images. Athleta lets the pictures speak, and the minimal layout — bilingual in English and Italian, printed by Siz Industria Grafica — creates a publication that functions as a visual essay rather than a conventional magazine. Distributed worldwide and now expanded into Athleta Lab, a media company offering editorial and commercial projects, the magazine blends sport with fashion, design, art, and urban subcultures. For readers who believe that the most powerful photograph of an athlete is not the one taken at the finish line but the one taken in the quiet moment before the race begins, Athleta is essential.
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