Antonio Mulas

Antonio Mulas is an Italian photographer born in Sassari, a city located in northern Sardinia, on the 22nd of September 1993.

With his family, composed by his father Pasqualino, a construction worker, and his mother Daniela, a housewife, he spent his early childhood years away from any type of tool that could stop time capturing images on printed paper. Living in the suburbs and in contact with nature is perhaps the element that will characterize the future and the career of the reporter who, from an early age, likes to dwell his gaze on what is happening around him, be they moments of peace in the countryside where he is grown or the most disparate and chaotic breakers in the center of his city. Those are the places where he finds himself surrounded by small artisans in their shops or nestled among the benches of the old market where the screams of those who sell their products always attract his attention.

For a child of just five years old, observing everyday life served as a tool to interpret the world, making events that didn't belong to it as if everything was worth living. But this was not enough. At the age of six he received from Pasqualina, his paternal grandmother, a small 1972 Kodak Instamatic 56-x that entered on tiptoe among his toys, binding himself forever to him as a first memory and a trigger for his passion for photography. The unquantifiable hours spent with his new gift, pretending to be a photographer and at the same time trying to capture its functioning, increased in him the desire to receive a tool that was really capable of taking pictures, a will never expressed verbally and which is set aside for growth to give space to other dreams. Adolescence runs away in a hurry and, with the age of majority, coinciding with the end of his studies, Antonio receives as a gift from his parents a Nikon DSLR that changes forever what he has imagined for his future up to that point, rekindling in him the fuse of that latent but never forgotten vocation. From the outset he devoted himself frantically to the study of the basics of photography, concentrating the first attentions on how a digital SLR is built and how it carries out its functions and then linger on the study of light and photographic composition.

Self-study was his first true teacher, a donor of a creative drive and an insatiable desire to discover that led him to alternate reading and the study of technique with the practice in the streets. In the first years of practice of the various photographic genres the tendency remains to portray people, following their own path driven by a strong attraction, delighting and at the same time in seizing the moment, enraptured by wanting to represent the spectacle offered by those they meet on the street. Turned twenty years old he moved for a period of six months to Valencia, Spain, where he discovered the world of the homeless people remaining striked by it. It is here that between one shot and another is literally burnt out by that lifestyle, so silent for those who let themselves be distracted by today's conformism but by the devastating impact for those who have the courage to really look. From this stream of consciousness sincere and sharp images come to life, honoring what is the real purpose of a photojournalist.

It is in 2014 that Mulas chooses to tell what his eyes have met and does so with his first and important social-based photographic project, entitled "Senza Fissa Dimora", a report made up of eighteen images designed to represent the everyday life of those men and those women who, in most cases, remain invisible. Back in his hometown with a wider life, eager to introduce his collection of shots and with the desire to get involved, he decided to meet Marco Sanna with the aim of organizing his first solo show which will be inaugurated some time later, October 14th of the same year.
During the first exhibition Mulas does not go unnoticed and, noticed by the Sassari photographic community, is invited to participate in the first photo competition "Uno Scatto Per Dare Voce" organized by the Mondo X Sardegna Association where, participating with five photos of the project on the homeless , you earn the first place. In this brief moment of his life, the satisfactions arrive fast and mark him to such an extent as to shape his character and his ideas, giving him the certainty that, with photography, you can really change something.

Antonio recounts: "The passion for the lens is something that has belonged to me since my childhood and as I grew up I realized I felt a sense of responsibility towards different social issues, a feeling that more and more often forces me to want to tell what the my eyes meet ".
In 2016 he decides to start a training course on portrait photography. His room became his studio and between one trial and another he created a photographic composition with a black background capable of emphasizing the faces of the protagonists, thus giving form to "FACES", a photographic project aimed at faithfully representing the diversity of the hand genre . Subjects search lasts about two years during which different individuals of different ages, ethnicities and religions are photographed.
During a chat with his friend and colleague Cristiano Dettori, a writer from Sassari equally interested in social issues, the two decided jointly to combine the photographic project "FACES" with the literary project "VOX" to provide a more in-depth look at the life of the people photographed. From that moment, thanks to the union of the names of the two projects, "FACES and VOX" was born. The two companies grow and follow a parallel path by meeting on the website www.facesvox.com, so as to provide anyone who wants a means of knowing and comparing their lives with those of those who have accepted to participate in the project.

At the age of twenty-five and at the completion of his latest project, Mulas presents the fruit of his work with a photographic exhibition inaugurated on November 27, 2018 at the Sala Duce of Palazzo Ducale in Sassari to his native city. Simultaneously with the exhibition, he presented his first self-produced book containing the first thirty portraits of the work.