The adrenaline photographer

Massimo Sestini is a photographer not comfortable with being told where he can and can’t photograph. And he’s proven time and time again that he’ll do almost anything to get the shot. Jesper Storgaard Jensen spoke with the Italian photographer renowned for his spectacular, and often risky, aerial photographs.

“I’m often told that it’s impossible to take a certain photo, or that it’s forbidden to go into certain areas to take photos. The moment I hear the words ‘not possible’, something clicks inside me. It’s like waving a red cape in front of a bull. This restriction becomes a challenge and I have to prove that it is actually possible to take the photos.

Massimo Sestini, a so-called “stuntman photographer” from Florence, is relaxed, sitting in his studio. That’s entirely understandable considering what he was doing the day before our interview. A storm had caused massive destruction along the Ligurian coastline and the 49-year-old had sent himself on a daring mission: to photograph a natural disaster while it was happening. “I heard about the storm and widespread destruction early in the morning, so I rushed to Florence’s small airport. I managed to find a small chopper and a pilot who was willing to take off immediately. There was a strong wind, it was raining, and it felt like the chopper was made of cardboard. So it wasn’t exactly a joyride. We took off a total of three times and were spinning around in the air for several hours. It was so bloody cold. Near the end of the shoot, I was so cold that I couldn’t keep a grip on my camera”, says Massimo with a chuckle.

However, the frozen fingers and the risky ride paid off. The next day when the natural disaster appeared in the headlines of all the Italian dailies, the accompanying photos bore the name of only one photographer: Massimo Sestini.

From a different angle

Massimo Sestini is entirely self-taught. His interest in photography was sparked when he received a Miranda DX camera for his 13th birthday. “From then on, I was focused on photography. I set up a darkroom in the family’s bathroom where I developed mainly black and white photos. Later on, in high school, I shot all the annual photos of the school’s various classes. At 17, I started to shoot lots of photos during rock concerts in and around Florence,” he recalls.

His first real job as a photographer was with the local daily, La Nazione. He learned how to track down important news, but also another crucial aspect - find the angle that best tells the story. “If you, for instance, have to photograph a car accident, you have to show the readers what really happened,” he says.

When Sestini left La Nazione to become a freelance photographer, he quickly discovered that there are only two types of photos: those that sell and those that don’t. “As a freelance photographer, I soon learned that to sell your product, you need to be able to offer something extraordinary.

You have to be able to tell a story with your photos and, if possible, from a totally new angle. Remember, many dailies and news magazines are able to get their images at low cost from news agencies such as Ansa, Reuters or Associated Press. They will only spend money on photos if they can get something really special,” he explains.

This philosophy prompted Massimo Sestini to go airborne in 1991. He began shooting photographs of VIPs from a small airplane. One of his most lucrative and memorable paparazzi shots is of a bikini-clad Lady Diana onboard a luxury yacht in Italian waters. He nabbed this shot from a two-motor sports plane. It was published worldwide and no doubt earned Sestini a king’s ransom.

Soon, he added feature photos to the paparazzi shots. In 1992, he went to Sicily on a feature assignment the day after the Mafia assassinated prosecuting magistrate Giovanni Falcone, who for years had investigated organised crime. “The day after the murder of Falcone, Palermo was totally packed with photographers. Falcone had been killed by a giant dynamite explosive hidden under a road in the small town of Capaci, just outside of Palermo. He had to take this road to get to the airport. The deadly explosion made headlines worldwide and the photographers present were elbowing each other to get good shots. I was becoming fed up with the situation, and I realised that I had to do something to get a shot that was different to those of my colleagues,” he recounts.

He found a different angle: from the air. He rushed to Palermo’s airport, where in record time managed to find a small Piper airplane and talked the pilot into taking off. Sestini’s aerial photos allowed the entire world to see how the Mafia bombing had left an enormous crater in the road.

Not work, passion

Sestini speaks with unbridled enthusiasm. He seems to be drawing figures in the air as he speaks. It’s obvious that photography is not a job, but a passion, especially when he has the air under his wings. “I love taking photos. It’s my job but also my hobby. But, as you know, in any job, routine inevitably sneaks in at a certain point. However, after many years of photography, shooting from the air has not yet become routine and probably never will. It’s still fantastic,” he says thoughtfully.

Over the years, this passion has become his “artistic trademark”. He’s capable of creating photographic art like only a few other photographers can. An excellent example is the funeral of Pope John Paul II in Rome in April 2005. Hundreds of photographers from all over the world were present to immortalise the important event, but Sestini couldn’t be spotted among them. “I knew beforehand that many photographers would be present, and it would have been difficult to work. They were all crowded on top of the colonnade, circling the piazza. So it was obvious that I needed to be airborne that day,” he says laughing.

He adds that this shot is probably the one that he’s most proud of. You see dark clouds hanging heavily over the Italian capital above hundreds of thousands of mourners overflowing from the piazza that’s surrounded by Rome’s many brown and ochre-coloured buildings. At the end of the day, Sestini was the only one of hundreds of photographers who was able to show the funeral event from a bird’s eye view.

When you look at Sestini’s collection of impossible shots, it’s clear that he’s a master of improvisation and getting the all-important shot, even when he faces obstacles. Look at his amazing shot from another funeral; this time for the victims of the April 2009 Abruzzo earthquake. During the funeral, a total of 287 coffins were lined up on red carpets.

Many photographers, including Sestini, weren’t permitted to enter. “The mass funeral in Abruzzo that year was such a huge event that I simply had to cover it from the air. I flew with one of my friends who has a license to pilot a chopper. Obviously, we didn’t want to disturb the ceremony in any way, so we choose to fly at an altitude of almost one kilometre. I used my most powerful telephoto lens, a 500mm, that weighs about three kilos,” says Sestini.

Despite the sadness and horror of the event, Massimo’s photo has terrifying beauty, because it manages to give the viewer a clear idea of the event and its emotional implications that simply would have been impossible to understand through an ordinary photo.

Juiced up

Sestini’s passion, when he speaks about aerial photography, is palpable. Asked whether he gets an adrenaline rush when going up in the sky with his camera, he replies emphatically. “Oh yes, definitely. Shooting from the landing skids of a helicopter really gives you a crazy rush. Finding a chopper or a small sports plane can be a difficult job in itself.

Keep in mind that often you have to act really fast. And before you leave, you really don’t have a 100% guarantee that the trip will go as you plan. You don’t know if you will actually be able to get the shots needed. It depends on the circumstances, especially the weather. So when you occasionally manage to get the dream shot that makes the paper’s front page, that’s a great moment,” he says with a wide grin.

But how does he actually do it when he’s perched on the chopper’s landing skids? Does he rely on a special technique? “Very often, I am standing outside the cockpit attached to the chopper with wires. I need to have both hands free to manoeuvre a 500mm lens. It therefore goes without saying that you need to be strapped in very well. I almost always shoot without a lens hood to avoid the wind grabbing the hood. Apart from that, I usually try to point the camera lens directly toward the ground. This allows me to focus on geometry and search for elements in the environment to frame to my photos,” explains Sestini.

An example of this geometry is Sestini’s photo in the airspace over a beach in Ostia outside Rome. It’s a shot of five rows of sunbathers on the beach. The geometry and the colours are so perfectly aligned that you clearly perceive the humour in this photo. It definitely has a Marin Parr touch to it.

It’s not easy to put a photographic label on Sestini. Over the years, he has worked in a wide range of genres: paparazzi, features, portraits, news and the risky, off-limits shots. You’d think that would be enough, but recently Sestini has actually expanded his repertoire. He photographs on land, in the air, and now underwater. He joined professional divers exploring the wreck of the gigantic cruise ship, Costa Concordia, which capsized close to the Italian coast in January 2012. The photos complimented his aerial shots in which the ship cruiser looks like a giant, floating, toy ship.

Danger on the job

Today, Sestini runs his own photo agency, Massimo Sestini News Pictures. He has ten employees covering Italy. On a daily basis, he sends his photographers on various assignments around the country. They need to be masters of many genres, from features to classic portrait photography. They also need to be able to handle some unusual tasks, including dressing up to sneak into off-limits, high society events, such as weddings. “These undercover challenges are the situations where the real art is to not get caught so as to avoid a sharp kick in the ass,” he says, laughing again.

The real danger, however, is when Sestini decides to go airborne for a photo. “In recent years, I have experienced some rather dangerous situations. Once I was returning to Florence after a shoot. We were over the Majella National Park in the Abruzzo region. Due to a violent storm, we ended up in a gigantic cloud. When we eventually came out of the cloud, we were too close to a mountain. We just barely avoided a disaster because the pilot managed to make an incredible manoeuvre,” he recounts.

Another time he climbed up a small tower to take some photos. When he climbed down, the railing that he was holding onto broke loose and he fell four meters with a huge camera around his neck. “I hurt myself quite badly, especially my left foot which was almost totally smashed. I couldn’t walk and I had to stop working for nine months. That was really a bad experience. But when you are out on an assignment, you really can’t think about the potential danger. You need to focus on the right shot. The good shot from the right angle”, he concludes.

Contact www.massimosestini.it