Massimo Listri began his career as a photographer at a very young age, with a series of black and white portraits of great people of the 20th century, from Acton to Pasolini. When he was seventeen, he worked with Bolaffi Arte. In 1981, he met Franco Maria Ricci and started a collaboration with the magazine FMR, which lasted twenty-five years. He has published over eighty books with the most prestigious European and American publishers, including Taschen, Rizzoli New York, Magnus, Konemann and Treccani, photographing ancient and modern architecture, elegant or abandoned places, intimate environments as well as boundless spaces.
Since 2003, he has combined his professional activity with artistic experimentation, embarking on a creative path that led him to exhibit for the first time in London in 2007, at the Voena+Robilant gallery. Palazzo Reale in Milan hosted his first solo show in 2008. Since then, he has held solo exhibitions all over the world, including those at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, at Palazzo Pitti, at the Museums of Modern Art in Bogota and Buenos Aires, among many more.
In 2019, he was named artist of the year by the magazine Il Giornale dell'Arte. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Vatican Museums, the Pecci Museum of Modern Art and the State Museum of Dresden. In 2014, his archive, which collects images from over 3,500 places in the world, was donated to the Listri Foundation for the Visual Arts, set up in Florence to preserve and enhance it and to promote photography.