On 14 March, Lviv Polytechnic hosted a lecture by a famous Italian photojournalist Francesca Mancini on the topic The Impact of Visuals in Communication in the 40th academic building. The photojournalist, who specialises in covering people in crisis situations, shared her professional experience and talked to students.
Francesca Mancini has been a reporter for over 25 years. Before her career in photography, she studied psychology. At the age of 18, she moved to New York, where she studied at a dance school. Later, she began travelling the world, including Africa, China and South America. Travelling became the impetus for her desire to take up photography. At the age of 24, Francesca began studying photojournalism. The war in the Balkans was the first war that Francesca Mancini documented. It was then that she finally decided that she would be a photojournalist and started working with news agencies. In 2015, she came to Ukraine for the first time to cover the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Later on, Francesca Mancini made reports on the environment, in particular, covering natural disasters, environmental pollution and their impact on human life and health. Another step in her career was reporting about people with drug addiction in the context of criminal proceedings. Later, she filmed reports on the Internet and online video chats.
Given the growing influence of the media in photojournalism, Francesca Mancini began to create reports in the format of podcasts. In 2022, the photographer returned to Ukraine to document the realities of the full-scale war. She worked near Odesa and Mykolaiv, filming audio reports on the events.
Francesca Mancini is convinced that photographs encourage awareness in both those who look at them and those who create them, because through photography we can better understand ourselves. She also expressed the opinion that it is important for students to work on themselves, their perception of the present moment and the image of future changes.