Always addicted to the World of Images, he fell in love with comics even before starting to know how to read them. Matteo Valentino grows up drawing and collecting pictures.
After four years of the Artistic High School, he stops with drawings and starts to work for the New Economy world, a very well paid work, but definitely unfulfilling.
In November 2003 Tommy Retrò finds a very old Rolleiflex inside a friend’s attic. After a few days he buys his first enlarger and truly starts to become keen to photography.
After two test films he understands that the time spent by taking friends’ and dead natures’ pictures don’t satisfy him at all and then he decides to accurately prepare his pictures, trying to take inspiration from the cinema, another Tommy Retro’s great passion.
He takes pictures under the name of “Tommy Retrò”, which uses most of all for nudes and noir pictures.
During the International of Solighetto (TV) he’s indicated by teacher Maurizio Rebuzzini, who advises him to pursue the “cinema road”, especially through its most “noir” atmospheres.
For these months of study, Tommy Retrò takes part in a lot of photography contests, with themes like “Senses”, “Transparency”, “Communication”, which styles of interpretation has really got appreciated. He wins various awards and publications on important magazines like “FotoCult”.
“Crime scene – do not cross”, his first project, has been presented in some Italian cities with very good success.
It is a fourteen shots series inspired on crime news of ‘50s with and on directors like Bunuel, Polanski, Hitchcock, Ferreri and so on.
In this last period Tommy Retrò has shifted on old fashion editorial style, seduced by Helmut Newton’s work, his great landmark in photography.
In this way, he discovers the pleasure to work on commission, freely interpreting a given theme, creating grotesque and surreal images, which reveal his cinema mania.

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