Luca A. Caizzi was still studying photography at IED Milan when he founded C41 — named after the standard chromogenic process used to develop colour film. It started as an online platform, a pragmatic way for a photography student to keep his research organised and shareable. The audience came quickly: requests for publication, reviews, a community of content creators who wanted to be featured. The transition to print was, as Caizzi puts it, almost forced by demand. Nobody taught them how to deal with publishing. C41 is the result of choices, tests, and attempts.
Now ten issues deep and based across Milan, Amsterdam, and Paris, C41 has evolved from a photography magazine into a broader editorial platform covering lifestyle, fashion, design, outdoors, and creative communities. The motto — “an ordinary life makes an extraordinary story” — defines the editorial approach: the magazine looks for people whose lives reflect contemporary aesthetics in apparently ordinary ways. A single issue might feature Torbjørn Rødland alongside Stella Maxwell, Kilo Kish alongside a brutalist palazzo in southern Italy, Max Siedentopf’s visual puns alongside 296 pages of projects that use photography as a way of thinking about the world.
With issue ten, Caizzi and his partner Leone Balduzzi — CEO and creative director of C41 Studio, the creative production company that grew alongside the magazine — relaunched in a new 210×280mm format designed to maximise paper savings, printed on non-harmful paper with sustainable inks. The magazine now functions as the editorial heart of a broader operation that produces content, events, and brand experiences for clients including Nike, Adidas, Flos, and Technogym. But the magazine remains the state of the art — the place where C41 tells the stories it believes in, on paper, because as Caizzi says: real is cool. Ours is much cooler. Long live paper.
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