Skyping with Inspiration, Chapter 1: Vincent Urbani

Life can be quite boring, as one can find oneself lost in the daily routine of university, revision and work, fortunately I have my quick ways of evading the tedium of repetitive days by talking to my dear friends that always provide me of a consistent amount of inspiration.

One of these is my dear friend Vincent Urbani, a Madrid based Italian Photographer that since 2007 has been intensively working in the Spanish capital, in Italy and Berlin.

We start our Skype conversation as usual with a laugh, as we cannot resist to friendly make fun of each other, and then we quickly skip on talking about cinema and how silly I am for not watching 007 Skyfall yet. He tells me that the storyline has improved from the previous films of the same series, how the character played by Javier Barden is fascinating, and how astonishing is the work of Roger Deakins director of lighting of the film. He ends up saying that quality is what matters and even if the plot is weak you can find great inspiration from the photography, the lighting and the feeling of a film. He then mentions is all time heroes Vittorio DeSica, Federico Fellini, Wong Kar-wai in a way that only a passionate person could do.

Walking through the jungle of symphonies and soundtracks that have marked the personal life of Vincent Urbani, I ask him to narrate me his experience as a director of music videos.



He tells me that, to him, music videos are a natural evolution of photography, and how initially he just wanted to start with simple things framing music with images.

And this is the story of the video of the Andy Warhol’s Interview Film inspired video for the track “Face2Face” by the U.S. group the HMMM.

Of a different nature was the approach given to the creation of the video for Casey Spooner Complicit where Vincent, with the help of a big production, wanted to create an idea. An idea that was not only music and images but was also fashion.

Our night time conversation continued on the issue of fashion, and as we began dealing with the topic Vincent made clear that he is not one of those who states to not live without fashion, but that what he loves about it is the creative process, the architecture of the textile.

Vincent loves how through fashion one can “find the word to define oneself without speaking” because it’s not true that there’s nothing behind the personal sense of style of a person, which is and should be as unique as a fingerprint.

Talking of uniqueness we ended up on the subject of working with Rossy De Palma (who is the latter on the list of celebrity Vincent has worked with). Vincent shot Rossy De Palma as a result of the collaboration between him and Schon Magazine; a Magazine that he is very happy of being partnered with, and which Editor in chief gives him a lot of freedom on the choice of who to shoot.



Vincent tells me how working with her has been a huge opportunity as when you photograph an Icon the picture that you are producing will be iconic to a certain extent, and this is not only a honour but also a heavy responsibility.

If you want to know more about this young and very talented photographer go to http://www.vincenturbani.com and check for some more.

Author: Paolo Maurizio Talanti (Author & Photographer @ The Label Line)