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Romano Cagnoni (Pietrasanta, Italy, 9 November 1935 – 30 January 2018) was an Italian photographer who spent most of his professional life based in London.
Cagnoni was the first western non-communist photographer to be allowed North Vietnam with the British journalist James Cameron. He worked in Cambodia, Nigeria during the civil war, Israel, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Kosovo, with the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in 1980, in Poland (1981), and Argentinian airports during the Falklands War in 1982. He was the first photographer to set up a studio on the front line to photograph soldiers during the fighting in Chechnya in 1995.
In 1968 he won the Overseas Press Club Award, for his Nigerian Civil War reportage published in Life, the German Art Directors' Club bronze medal for documenting with a large format camera the destruction from the war in the former Yugoslavia, and many Italian prizes. In the late 1980s, he returned to live in Pietrasanta in Italy, from where he travels worldwide for his work.
Cagnoni held 43 solo exhibitions, 43 group shows and retrospectives worldwide. His exhibition at Palazzo dell'Arengario in Milan, bore the title "Chiaroscuro", which, beyond the literal meaning, hints to "humour and darkness": these photographs show the darkness of war and sometimes the humour of everyday life. Cagnoni felt that these opposites are the essence of his work.
The Sunday Times former editor Harold Evans, in his book Pictures on a Page: Photo-Journalism, Graphics and Picture Editing,Harold Evans, Pictures on a Page: Photo-journalism, Graphics and Picture Editing, 1978, Heinemann mentions Cagnoni as one of the most famous photographers in the world with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bill Brandt, Don McCullin and Eugene Smith.
In 1970 Cagnoni married the English artist Berenice Sydney, who died in 1983.
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