Between 1956 and 1959, as a young man fresh out of high school, Thomas Hoepker travelled to Italy regularly to take photographs with a Leica MP camera. More than 10,000 negatives were produced during this period. In his pictures of Italy, Hoepker found a social perspective that would accompany and shape his work as a photojournalist throughout his life. His humanistic gaze and the cinematic composition of his images loosely aligns them with the neorealist cinema of the time, while at the same time focusing on people and their lives as part of social communities. ‘Italia’ brings together an extensive selection of these early-career photographs in one comprehensive volume.