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Stefano Schirato

Photographer

Stefano Schirato

Black Tomato

At Rignano Garganico, near Foggia, south of Italy, in an isolated area, there is a ghetto that has become a village, with its restaurants, its bars. Seasonal workers, often immigrants without a residency permit, are recruited by African foremen who have absolute power and decide who works and who does not. They are the irregulars of the tomato industry. Rotten beams and old windows nailed between them held in the houses: cardboard walls and dirt floor, inside the old mattresses thrown to the ground and some blankets worn. There is no electricity or water, sewage system, or services. To wash you have to fill the tanks and heat the water in the pots. In summer the Ghetto is full of immigrants from all over Italy in search of work and the slums comes to accommodate over 1200 people. They open restaurants and bars of luck, small shops where you can buy items of basic necessities at low prices and shops to repair vehicles that serve to lead the workers to the fields. The Ghetto is divided by areas of origin: Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Guinea Conakry, Senegal, Nigeria, Mali and Benin. The African laborers who work in Puglia live in our country for years. In the North. They worked in Milan, Turin, Brescia, in factories and on construction sites.

Stefano Schirato

Stefano Schirato was born in Bologna in 1974, where he graduated in Political Sciences.
 He has been working as a freelance photographer with a keen focus on social themes for more than 15 years. He collaborates with several magazines, associations and NGOs such as  Emergency, Caritas Internationalis, ICMC, for which he has partecipated in projects on human rights, refugee crisis and illegal immigration. His work has been published on The New York Times, CNN, Newsweek Japan,  Al Jazeera, Vanity Fair, Le Figaro, Geo International, Burnmagazine. He has several ongoing projects in Russia, Ukraine, Albania, Romania and about pollution and corruption in the South of Italy. His last work on the Refugee Crisis along the Balkan Route “One Way Only”  has been exposed in the Chamber of Deputies in Rome by the President Laura Boldrini.