Andrea (Andy) Rocchelli was born in 1983 in Pavia, Italy. After graduating in visual design from Milan Polytechnic, he began to work for the Grazia Neri photographic agency and later became assistant to the photographer Alex Majoli. In 2008, he co-founded Cesura, an independent photographic agency based in Pianello Val Tidone, near Piacenza. In 2009, he started a photographic project to document human rights abuses in various republics in the Caucasus, including Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan. A year later, he reported on the crisis in Kyrgyzstan for Human Rights Watch, and when the 2011 Arab spring erupted, he went to Tunisia and Libya. Andy also turned his curious photojournalist’s eye to his native country, embarking on a series of projects dedicated to crime in Calabria, the vocation of young priests, and velinismo (TV showgirl culture as a shortcut to “fame” despite its casual objectification of women). His photographs have been used by some of the most important international publications.
Andy Rocchelli was killed on 24 May in the city of Sloviansk, eastern Ukraine, where he was covering the clashes between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian army. His guide and colleague, Russian journalist and human rights activist Andrey Mironov, was also killed.
