Furia at Pitti Uomo: The Man Who Paints Baseball Caps in Florence

A portrait of the artist known as Furia during Pitti Uomo — hand-painting New Era caps at a desk overlooking Palazzo Vecchio, in a jacket he decorated himself, with a white Fiat 500 parked outside.

Pitti Uomo is the week when Florence stops being a Renaissance city and becomes a runway. Twice a year the menswear trade arrives in the Fortezza da Basso and several thousand extremely well-dressed people spill out into streets that were not designed for them. Most photographers go for the peacocks outside the gates. I went looking for someone actually making something.

I found Furia. He paints baseball caps by hand — New Era fitteds, mostly, the same silhouette you'd see on a subway platform in the Bronx — and he does it sitting at a desk in a window with Palazzo Vecchio over his shoulder. That collision is the entire story. American streetwear, Florentine stone, one man with a brush.

The jacket tells you first

You know before he says anything. The denim jacket is covered in his own work: small figures, scribbles, colour worked into the seams until the garment reads more like a canvas that happens to have sleeves. The trousers are patched and spattered. The shoes are black with red laces. Nothing about it is accidental, and none of it looks styled.

This is a gift for a portrait photographer. I did not have to build a character — I had to keep up with one. The first frames are simply him sitting outside a shop window papered with postcards, then walking the Lungarno with a white bag over his shoulder and the whole city out of focus behind him.

Working the details

A person like this is really three subjects: the face, the hands, and the objects. So I shot all three. The tattooed forearms over the pinstriped sleeve. The brush going into the navy crown of a cap, brim already flecked. And parked outside, a white Fiat 500 with a red rose laid beside the radio and the marque pressed into tan leather — a car that could not be more Italian if it tried, waiting for a man who dresses like Queens.

Details do a specific job in a story like this. Wide shots tell you where you are; details tell you who somebody is. I use the same approach on commercial sets — it is exactly how I covered the tailoring for Arturo Calle, where the stitch and the cuff carried more of the campaign than any full-length shot did.

“American streetwear, Florentine stone, one man with a brush. The collision is the whole story.”

Shooting through glass

My favourite frame of the set is the one I almost didn't take. He was working under a brass lamp behind a large window, and instead of going inside I stayed on the street and shot through the glass. The reflection dropped the Piazza della Signoria straight across his chest — six hundred years of architecture superimposed on a man decorating a baseball cap.

Reflections are usually a problem to be solved. Occasionally they are the picture. Photographing through glass costs you contrast and gives you a second layer of information, and when the second layer is a Medici palace it is a very good trade.

Why this shoot sits with the rest

This was made on the same Italian trip as my Florence street style work and a few days before the light on Capri. Three completely different registers — crowd, portrait, landscape — from one stretch of the same country. That range is deliberate. A body of work that only does one thing gets hired for one thing.

And it belongs with my other portraits of people who make things with their hands, like the vintage racers at TROG. Craft photographs well because craft is patient. You can wait for the right gesture, and the gesture will come back around.